Interactively hiding and showing series on a chart is something that end users have been asking for as long as I have been working with Xcelsius. In the past, to accomplish this relatively simple task, it required a great deal of acrobatics utilizing dynamic visibility. Now with Xcelsius 5.3.0.0 (SP3) we have a quick and simple way to set this up with built in functionality.

I saw a retweet go by yesterday from @MicoYuk, originally tweeted by @deeceedas, that struck me:

@XcelsiusGurus i want a software so easy to use that no one should need SDK

I suspect this came from the question that was dropped on whether we need an Xcelsius SDK. If you don't know me by now, I'm definitely an SAP Business Objects enthusiast. On top of that I always seem to have teams that co-mingled in application development, both on the Java and .NET fronts. So while you think my knee-jerk reaction would be "heck yeah", I'd like to answer more carefully than that.

I'm preping for this year's SBOUC and discovered something interesting with SAP Explorer on my iPad.  First off I'm a fan of using SSL encryption on SAP BusinessObjects deployments for security's sake.  However, the cost of managing dozens of certificates can be tidious and prohibitive.  That said, self-signed certs are a great alternative for keeping it simple in lower environments.  One thing discovered here, however, is that SAP Explorer for the iPad and iPhone will reject that self-signed cert and not allow you to log on.  Interesting challenge.  Guess it is time to consider ClickSSL certs for every environement now...

2010-08-08 Corrected Formulas below

This will be the first part of a series of blogs that illistrates how to flow data from Excel to Xcelsius using Crystal Reports and XML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has had export support from Crystal Reports for quite a while. While the Export to XML option allows for specification of a transform file (XSL/XSLT), another handy export option I value is Export to Text. I’ll get back to that in a second.

In my last post I took a gander at the coolness that is the Program Job Server (PGS). I also hinted at the fact that you could leverage this server to improve your scheduling of Data Integator (DI) jobs. I really didn't want to leave you hanging on that thread. Let's take a look at how you can leverage the SAP Business Objects PGS to incorporate your DI jobs into your job flows.