Introducing the BI Launch Pad User Interface

The Global Navigation bar allows you to traverse between User Settings, Recently visited, and Notifications.

The following items are available in the Global Navigation bar:

• Search
• Refresh
• Notifications
• Web Assistant
• User Settings

See the following video to learn more about the BI Launch Pad tool bar.

The Folders tile in Home displays the total count of the reports that you have access to. The BI platform supports both public and personal folders.

Public folders are typically created by a system administrator. You can create personal folders in the BI Launch Pad.

On expanding the tree view, sub-folders and child folders are shown, if any. When you select a folder in the tree view, the folder gets highlighted, and its content is displayed.

The Categories tile in the Home tab displays the number of categories that you have access to. Click the Categories tile to navigate to the categories page.

BI launch pad supports two types of categories:

The Documents tile in the Home page shows all the content objects (such as reports and documents) in the BI Launch Pad.

The BI Inbox lets you view and manage system alerts and administrator notifications. You can select one of these options for an alert or a document in the BI Inbox:

• Mark as Read
• Mark as Unread
• Delete

In the BI Launch Pad, you can send the required report to recipient's BI Inbox. You can share the report to a single user or user group.

You can schedule an object to run automatically at specified times. When a scheduled object runs successfully, an instance is created. An instance is a copy of the object that contains data.

In the Instances page, you can view the list of instances for a specific date range. To select a date range, you can specify a start and end date in the calendar. You can perform various actions depending on the status of the selected instance. You can even choose multiple instances and perform actions on them.

You can filter the instances based on the below status of the instances:

• Success
• Partial Success
• Failed
• Running
• Recurring
• Paused
• Expired

You can filter the instances based on the report type. Following report types are available for filtering the instances:

• Publication
• Analysis Workbook
• Crystal Reports
• Lumira Document
• Web Intelligence
• Adobe Acrobat
• Microsoft Excel
• Text (CSV, CSV & HTML Archive)

The Recycle Bin tile lists the deleted objects.

When you delete an object from the system, it is moved to the Recycle Bin, where it is temporarily stored until the Recycle Bin is emptied. This helps you to recover accidentally deleted objects and restore them to their original locations.

• SAP Analytics Cloud:

  The SAP Analytics Cloud is one simple cloud solution connecting your people, information, and ideas to enable fast and confident decision-making.

  Machine learning technology and embedded artificial intelligence help you to discover deep insights, simplify access to critical information, and empower informed decision-making for all. This enables you to create dynamic visual stories based on your key business areas with trusted data that is managed by IT. It lets you make better decisions by interacting with visualizations, drilling down for more detailed information, and answering business questions on the fly.

  It also seamlessly integrates with your data and planning solutions to simplify your analytics landscape. You can connect to data from multiple different sources and visually analyze your information to see the full picture of your business and make better-informed decisions.

  You can create and modify versions of your planning data to drive better budgeting, forecasting, and analysis for the future of your business.

• Web Intelligence
• Crystal Reports for Enterprise
• Analysis edition for OLAP
• BI Workspace:

  A BI Workspace lets you organize and display different BI platform data sources in a single view. It lets you quickly see your organizational goals and monitor your organization's performance and growth. With BI Workspaces, you can analyze and manage complex data effectively and share the information across organizations.

  You can build your own portfolio of reports and categories and create one or more BI Workspaces to display them as needed.

• Information Steward
• Lumira Discovery
• BEx Web Applications:

  You can use BEx web applications in the Business Explorer (BEx) of Business Warehouse (BW) for data analysis, reporting, and analytical tasks.

  BEx is the SAP Business Intelligence suite. It provides flexible reporting and query, reporting, and analysis tools for strategic decision-making support in a business. As an employee with access authorization, you can use BEx web applications to evaluate historical or current data at various levels of detail and from different perspectives, on the web and in Microsoft Excel. You can access data from the SAP Enterprise portal or from the BI Launch pad in the BI platform.

  Before you can open BEx web applications in the BI Launch pad, your system administrator must configure a platform server and a connection to a BW system. Authors of BEx web applications format data from SAP BW in the BEx Web Application Designer, using web items (analysis, filter pane, chart, map, document, and so on). Once the platform server and connection to a BW system are configured, you can open BEx web applications in the launch pad, navigate the data, and save the navigational state of BEx web applications as bookmarks in your browser favorites.

In the BI Launch Pad, you can start an application and then create, view, and edit corresponding objects, and save your changes or new objects directly to the repository.

The BI Launch pad search enables you to search content within the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.3. The search in the BI Launch pad starts looking for matches as you enter search text.

See the following video to learn more about searching for content objects.

You can schedule an object to automatically run at specified times. When a scheduled object runs successfully, an instance is created.

An instance is a copy of the scheduled object that contains data from the data source at the time the object ran. You can view a list of instances in an object's history. If you have access rights to view objects on demand, you can view and refresh any instance to retrieve the latest data from the data source. By scheduling and viewing instances, you ensure that objects have the most up-to-date information available for viewing, printing, and distributing.

You can see a list of instances by looking at a document's history, and you can view the document by clicking the link.

The default time zone is local to the web server that runs the BI platform, not to the Central Management Server (CMS) that your machine connects to. Before scheduling objects, confirm that your local time zone is selected in the BI Launch pad preferences. If you do not have access rights to view or to set your preferences, contact your system administrator.