You've already implemented SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards or Xcelsius. Now your BI Team tells you that XWIS will help them produce more dashboards, more quickly, with more interactivity, for less cost. And, your business users tell you how the rich, interactive features provided by XWIS will streamline their decision making and make them more effective.
But what does this mean for you? How does XWIS fit in to your existing environment?
XWIS is developed by Antivia, an SAP Partner. XWIS is the fastest, most cost-effective way to create, manage and deploy actionable dashboards with SAP Business Objects Dashboards and Xcelsius.
The XWIS Enterprise platform consists of a sophisticated back-end server, which efficiently manages data access, and a set of smart, front-end components that reduce dashboard complexity and increase accessibility.
The XWIS server provides native access to data and meta-data stored within different BI Systems including SAP BusinessObjects, SQL databases, and OLAP cubes.
XWIS supports BusinessObjects XI and above. All integration between XWIS and your SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform is through the SAP BusinessObjects SDK and is similar to a user accessing a document within InfoView.
XWIS fetches its data from cached WebIntelligence documents or Crystal Reports. You can schedule these reports overnight or refresh them periodically throughout the day. So, XWIS results in fewer query refreshes, relieving the pressure on your database.
XWIS integration with SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise is SAP certified.
The XWIS server runs on commodity hardware and needs a minimum of a single 2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB memory per CPU, and at least 1 GB disk space. Supported server operating systems are Windows Server 2003 R2/2008, Ubuntu 7.1.0 or above, and Red Hat Linux Enterprise 5.
For larger deployments, to provide greater scalability and failover, you can deploy multiple XWIS servers in parallel using a Load Balancer to provide linear scalability.
XWIS related meta-data is stored within the XWIS repository, which is ideally set-up within its own database schema on a supported RDBMS platform: SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL.
The dashboard designers in your BI Team will need to install the XWIS add-on (XLX- Xcelsius extension file) to their SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards or Xcelsius development environment. This is achieved by:
Note: To install the add-on on Windows 7, you need to run SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards or Xcelsius with Administrator privileges (you can do this by right clicking the program icon and selecting “Run as administrator).
For dashboard creation, XWIS supports Xcelsius 2008 SP1 and above and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 and above.
With XWIS, there is no additional software requirement for your dashboard users. Any dashboard user who is already set-up to receive SAP BusinessObjects, with Adobe Flash Player installed on their machine, will be able to access dashboards that have been augmented by XWIS.
Compared to other data connectivity methods, XWIS reduces the network traffic generated by SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards or Xcelsius. XWIS uses less network bandwidth because:
The XWIS server provides authentication services for non-BusinessObjects installations. However, if you are connecting to a BusinessObjects installation, you can reduce your administration overhead by authenticating directly against BusinessObjects, using any of the standard BusinessObjects authentication methods:
Additionally, the XWIS service can be configured to be part of a Business Objects Trusted Authentication deployment.
Like SAP BusinessObjects, XWIS is designed to protect against unauthorized access and the architecture supports features such as: SSL encryption, reverse proxies, single sign-on, and LDAP or Windows AD authentication.
The optional XWIS Publish module allows your BI Team to publish personalized dashboards, more frequently, to more users, on any device. By default, XWIS Publish distributes dashboards through your corporate email system.
XWIS Publish is installed as an add-on to your existing SAP BusinessObjects BI publishing platform and uses the power of SAP BusinessObjects to schedule and deliver personalized dashboards into your users’ inboxes.
Published dashboards are attached to emails and are accessible offline, so each dashboard is a self-contained Adobe Flash file (SWF format) which preserves all data, formatting and interactivity. For larger dashboards, the SWF fill can grow up to 4MB in size.
When dashboards are accessed offline, they are protected by 128 bit encryption and digital rights management.
Check out the XWIS architecture
Learn how to use the power of XWIS with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and Xcelsius to produce more dashboards, more quickly, with more interactivity, for less cost.
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