While Jose is off for the holidays he asked if I would contribute to the BI Blog.  At first I panicked thinking about the responsibilities and commitment required to maintain a corporate blog.  That panic quickly subsided as I realized that I was a guest blogger.  That’s like being a guest host on a talk show!  Should be fun.

First thing I had to do was come up with an appropriate topic that readers would relate to.  Should I talk about all the successful upgrades to SAP BI 4.x that we have done this year? Should I share our “lessons learned” from those upgrades? Maybe I should talk about my current project, where I got the opportunity to work with the latest SAP technologies such as HANA and Dashboards? Those are all great topics, but I’ll keep them in mind for next blog entries.

The Mobile Webinar

I have decided to make my first blog entry about the webinar we recently hosted. Two weeks ago we hosted a webinar that introduced our customers to the mobile side of BI. We introduced the SAP BI Mobile application.  I should say that preparing and hosting webinars is probably the most exciting part of my job. Having to introduce new concepts and technologies to our customers and professional networks requires us to dive deep into those topics.

SAP BI Mobile App

I was very excited about the Mobile Webinar in particular, realizing that in order to prepare for it; I would have to “play” with the iPad and Android Tablets to learn all about the SAP BI mobile app.   This wasn’t my first exposure to SAP Mobile applications. Prior to working with SAP BI Mobile app, I have worked with SAP Business Objects Mobile app and the SAP Explorer Mobile app both on iPad.

Until recently those were separate apps. Now that they have been combined into one, the users can access all mobile friendly content via a single point of entry.  Speaking of mobile friendly content, we know that not all content is supported on both, android and iOS.  While, there is support for virtually all SAP BI content types on the iPad, android lags behind.  Clearly iPad is SAP’s mobile device of choice.  That’s where SAP and I disagree.  As a devoted Android user, I cannot wait until the SAP BI Mobile app has as much support for Android devices as it does for the iPad. I am especially hopeful to see Explorer supported on Android devices.

Features of the SAP BI Mobile App

In our webinar we showed our audience some of the basic features available on the SAP BI mobile app. We showed how easy it is to make WebI reports available on mobile devices by simply tagging them in the “Mobile” category on the platform.

We also discussed using various layout techniques in the reports to make them easier to read on a mobile device.  We shared some tricks of the trade by demonstrating how to create scorecards that are only visible on mobile devices.

Looking Ahead

There’s so much more to discuss when it comes to Mobile BI. Our first mobile webinar barely scratched the surface. We hope you can attend Mobile 5.0 in SAP BI 4.1 Part 2! We will discuss more elaborate techniques for working with Mobile BI content.   

If you did not have the opportunity to attend our first webinar on SAP BI Mobile, please follow this link to the webinar recording.

Hope everyone has a happy and prosperous 2014 and I look forward to future contributions to the BI Blog.

Happy New Year!