SAC comes with the Explorer view mode which is a faceted view of you data. It's the same user experience that you have with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. To learn how to use it you can have a look at the official documentation here. You can also have a look at the document in the section: Migration Example by Use Case for Explorer
1 Data connectivity
All datasources supported by BO Explorer are available in SAC
Data Source | SAP BO Explorer | SAP Analytics Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| SAP BusinessObjects Universe (unx) | Yes | Yes |
| SAP BusinessObjects Universe (unv) | Yes | Yes |
| SAP Hana | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Excel | Yes | Yes |
| SAP BW | Yes | Yes |
| and many more |
In SAC there are 2 types of data connection : the Live Data Connection and the Import Data Connection. With LIve Data Connection your data stay in the source system. With the Import Data Connection you data are replicated in SAP Analytics Cloud. Depending of your requirments you can use either type of connection. If you don't want to move your data then you will use the live data connection. If you want to enrich your dataset (calculated measure, hierarchy, predict, geolocalisation...) you will use the import data connection.
2 Comparison: Capabilities while creation of Infospaces against a story on SAC:
| Capability | SAP BO Explorer | SAP Analytics Cloud |
| Grouping Facets | Yes | No |
| Filters support | Yes | Yes |
| Rename Measures & Dimensions | Yes | Yes |
| Validate Infospaces | Yes | Yes |
| Add, Subtract, Multiply & Divide two measures | Yes | Yes |
| Set Trend on custom measures | Yes | Yes (with Thresholds in Stories) |
| Display Formatting Options (Thousands, none, percentage, Currency & Scientific) | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduling support | Yes (on Infospaces) | Yes (at the Model level) |
| Security (Personalization) | On individual infospaces | Yes (Can be done at model level) |
3 Charting Capabilities
Chart Type | Explorer | SAC |
|---|---|---|
| Bar Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Bar Chart with two y axes | Yes | No |
| Radar Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple Radar Chart | Yes | No |
| Surface Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Tag cloud Chart | Yes | No |
| Pie Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple Pie Chart | Yes | No |
| Vertcical 100% Stacked Column Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Vertcical 100% Stacked Bar Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Treemap | Yes | Yes |
| Scatter Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Bubble Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Line Chart | Yes | Yes |
| Line Chart with two Y Axis | Yes | Yes |
| Multi Bar Chart | Yes | No |
| Mutti Line Chart | Yes | No |
4 Comparison: Capabilities Supported while exploring Infospaces against using SAC
| Capability | SAP BO Explorer | SAP Analytics Cloud |
| Split View | Yes | Yes |
| Facets only view | Yes | No |
| Visualizations only view | Yes | Yes (Stories) |
| One click Filtering | Yes | Yes |
| On the fly variable creation | Yes | Yes |
| Free text search | Yes | Yes |
| Bookmarking | Yes | Yes |
| Export Visualization data as csv | Yes | Yes |
| Sorting | Yes | Yes |
| Ranking | Yes | Yes |
| Direct link to the infospaces/story (Opendoc) | Yes | Yes |
| Pass parameters in document link | Yes | Yes |
| And many more functionalities |
5 Maps
With BusinessObjects Explorer you can add a Geography analysis type. You use Geography to analyze data by geographical distribution directly on a geographical location map. This type of chart can help visualize differences in cities or regions directly while visualizing the targeted country map. Teere are 2 types of geo map available in Explorer : Chloropeth geomap and Bubble geomap.
SAC provides 5 types of geo map layers relying on esri basemap ((https://www.esri.com/en-us/home). You could have more detailed information for Maps capabilities in SAC here.
6 Bookmarks
In BO Explorer you can save an exploration result as a bookmark. This bookmark can be loaded later or can be share with others users.
In SAC you can also create bookmarks to save different states of a story. A bookmark can be personal (only visible by his creator) or global (visible by all users). A personal bookmark can be shared with others users. More details here.
7 Search
In BO Explorer you can search for data in an information space . The result is highlighted in facets.
SAC supports a search by facet. Moreover SAC provides also a global search at the level of the home page called "Search to Insight". This means that you can search for data without opening an SAC story. You can find more information here
8 Predefined Objects
BO Explorer comes with Predefiened objects. The default measure "Occurrences" is one of them. It returns the number of occurences of each distinct value in a facet.
If you want to do that in SAC you have different options :
- You can create a imported model where you can add a column with the fomula fx=1; All cells of this column will contain the value 1.
Advantages of using SAC over Explorer for similar use cases
There are a lot of new features in planning, predictive and in BI areas on SAP Analytics Cloud. Below are to name a few that could be interest for users currently using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.
| Capability | SAP BO Explorer | SAP Analytics Cloud |
| Smart Insights (Predictive) | No | Yes |
| Smart Discovery (What if analytics, correlations and unexpected values) | No | Yes |
| Live connectivity to UNX and UNV | No | Yes |
| Linking datasets | No | Yes |
| Data enrichment capabilities while modelling | No | Yes |
| Commentary | No | Yes |
| Templates for (Stories/Views) | No | Yes |
| Planning | No | Yes |
| Analytics Designer | No | Yes |
In addition to hundreds of other advanced capabilities (including Smart Insights, commentary, etc..) offered by SAC, below are the key advantages of using SAC over Explorer.
- Unlike Explorer infospaces which needs to be scheduled individually, SAC model updates can be scheduled and all SAC stories based on the model will reflect the latest data. This will ensure the number of calls made to back-end system is minimal.
- Security can be applied on Model level and hence is respected in all the stories. The need of personalization on individual info spaces can be eliminated.
- SAC provides direct (Live) connectivity to UNX and UNV(SAP BusinessObjects universe) there by enabling the users to see the latest data without needing to replicate/schedule the data import.
- In addition to what Explorer supports today, SAC offers lots of other data connectivity options including (S/4HANA, BW/4HANA and other cloud Sources)
- Getting away from Flash.
Migration Example by Use Case for Explorer (migration path)
In the following document you will see how to create an SAC story in order to replace an Explorer Information Space : Converting an Explorer document to a SAC story
Migration project : How to proceed for Explorer ?
If you plan to migrate your Explorer documents into SAC you can follow this process :
With SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 we will add explorer objects in the CMS Data Access Driver. The information will be accessible from a sample universe
From this universe you will be able to create a Webintelligence document in order to list all the Explorer Information Spaces present in your CMS with all their properties (data source, facet name,measure name, filters ...)
For more details on the CMS DB Driver please visit this page : https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Unlock+the+CMS+database+with+new+data+access+driver+for+BI+4.2