Found the client's identity guidelines today too, now I can get started creating Color Themes. Deployment should be a reasonable process - it's just a little XML file under C:\Documents and Settings\<login>\Application Data\XcelsiuscustomThemes
Monday, 22nd of February, 2010
Sunday, 21st of February, 2010
Friday, 19th of February, 2010
The good news is that they have BW Accelerator, so queries come back with all the data in under a second. While many enterprise Xcelsius dashboards now utilize LiveOffice as a temporary storage area to deliver acceptable response times, I am welcoming the opportunity to bypass it. The bad news is that they don't have the newer Netweaver platform that supports direct access to BEx queries - so I'm creating Web Service connections instead. The dashboard interacts with the BEx query through the web service, sending parameters as variables to it and returning the data on-demand to the users.
This allows each tool to do what it does best - BW performs the filtering and aggregation of the data, and the Xcelsius presentation components are bound to just a handful of cells in a very straightforward model. Selectors continue to enable users to traverse large hierarchies of enterprise information.
Both mandatory and optional variables come over automatically to the Universe as predefined filters without any trouble. The hierarchical variable works very well too since each value has a unique key in the entire BW dimension regardless of what level it is in the hierarchy. List of values are automatically created to translate business terms to the technical name behind the scenes.
Picture - There is an option in the OLAP Universe wizard that creates the TECH_NAME detail object for responding to prompts, but if you forget to select the option creating the [TECH_NAME] object manually is simple enough.
Thursday, 18th of February, 2010
Picture - Before I got the dremel out and started cutting, I went back to Micro Center because they do have the most enormous selection of power supplies I've ever seen - surely there is something that will fit. After looking around and even talking with an associate, patience paid off and I found the Hercules "Space Saving Design" power supply. Another associate, Joseph, was nice enough to open it up for me so I could do some preliminary measuring and it will definitely fit.