SAP Analytics Cloud – Sharing and Collaboration Part 1/2

Sharing and collaboration are essential in any given team, but it becomes critical when it involves diversified multifunctional teams. The analysis doesn’t stop when you complete your application – the conversation continues in meetings, over email, and during casual chats. Thus, SAP Analytics Cloud provides a wide range of features for seamless collaboration that in turn enhance teamwork and productivity. This blog lists out the predominant features (in no particular order) that make SAP Analytics Cloud a great platform for synergy.

Discussions

Want to share your analytic application and get feedback from your peer through real-time chatting? Open the discussion panel and invite him/her. You can share your application, assign a task or even create a new process within the discussions panel while you chat. The attachments are not just limited to elements within the SAP Analytics Cloud. You can even share your local document like Wireframes. There are options to create a group, archive or delete a discussion as well.

Discussion

2. Comments

Are you a social media lover who actively comments on social feeds to share your insightful opinion? Have you ever wondered how great it would be if you could do the same in BI analytics applications? Then this feature from SAP analytics cloud is for you. Commenting allows you to start a real-time conversation with the collaborators of the shared application, around your key business metrics, facilitating collaborative decision making. You can post comments on widgets to start a specific conversation.

You can also ask your sales manager why a product is not performing well in his region by commenting on the actuals data cell of that product in that region and tag that Sales manager. It doesn’t stop here; you can even display those important comments in a dedicated column for easier visibility.

Comments

3. Calendar Tasks & Processes

Managing a big team? Keeping your tasks organized just got easier. You can split your project work into processes and tasks. Assign those to responsible users, add reviewers and set deadlines. You can even add context to the tasks making it easier to zero in on the data that an assignee needs to work with. This just made monitoring project progress a cakewalk.

Featuring two modes of process monitoring – Calendar and Gantt, SAP analytics cloud allows you to choose a mode of viewing the project plan based on your needs and time frame. The calendar view is the standard calendar layout (Day, Week, Month). Gantt view, just as its name suggests is a Gantt kind of chart that allows you to visualize and create tasks for up to years in the project timeline. You can create general tasks, data locking task, task/process by driving dimension and process in Calendar/Gantt view. You can also add filters based on style, status, roles, due and type. Calendar tasks are even downloadable.

Calendar Task

4. Input Tasks

Are you forecasting the sales for the next quarter and need additional information from your colleague for that? You can create an input task for that table which is using planning model and assign to them to get additional info. Also, if there is a value driver tree based on the same model as the table, they can also give input by performing simulations on the value driver tree.

You can view the created input tasks and its progress in Files -> Input Forms and in the calendar. You will also have a summary page in the story that lists the input tasks for that story.

Input Task

5. Users & Teams

Consider you are a resource manager and want to create users and teams for your project groups. Don’t worry it is not a Herculean task, SAP analytics cloud provides a user-friendly interface which allows creating users manually by providing details or by importing from a file. When users work together, they might need access to the same documents. You can organize the group’s analytic content as teams to quickly collaborate and manage their permissions by creating a folder for your team to stay organized.

In the next part of this blog, we will discuss a few more significant features of sharing and collaboration in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Check out our blog series here to learn more about Analytic Applications in SAP Analytics Cloud.

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