Live Office vs. QaaWS vs.

BI Services
If youre building an Xcelsius dashboard, and connecting it to a database, you have three (main) options. Picking between the three is often a source of confusion. Hopefully this post will help explain some of the differences, and help you decide which is best for your scenario. First up, an overview of each:

Live Office. Live Office is a Business Objects tool that is installed as an add-on to Microsoft Office Excel. This allows you to connect the Excel spreadsheet within your dashboard to a Webi or Crystal report, which in turn connects to your data source. Query as a Web Service. QaaWS is a Business Objects client tool that creates a web service, based on a query, that connects directly to a universe. BI Services. BI Services is the (relatively) new kid on the block. It creates a web service from a report block in a Webi report, which in turn connects to your data source.

Im going to set up, where possible, a like-for-like comparison of the three, comparing things like ease of development, speed and flexibility, all based on the same data source the Microsoft AdventureWorks database. Ill go these steps quickly, so if youre not familiar with the tools, you may also want to head over to help.sap.com to pick up the manuals. For the setup Ill be using XI3.1 SP3 FP3.5, but Ill reference BI4.0 in a few places, since it brings with it some new options. Full Disclosure: I have a strong bias towards one of these three.

The Setup
Web Intelligence Report
Both Live Office and BI Services will connect Xcelsius to a Webi report, so for the purposes of comparison, Ill use the same report. In this report, I have three blocks set up:

Revenue by Product Category. A dead-simple block:

Top 10 Cities by Revenue. A fairly simple block with a rank applied to only show the top 10 cities.

Top 20 products based on sales for the last three months, for each showing the average revenue per sale, per month, over the last 12 months. Something a little bit fancy. I have a variable to calculate the revenue over the last three months. I use this in my ranking, but display the average revenue per sale, per month, over the last 12 months in the block. The rank looks like this:

and the block looks like this:

Ive saved this report, and scheduled it to run once.

Live Office
With Live Office, you start in Excel, where you create a connection to the Webi report. Later, Xcelsius will re-use that connection to fetch the data into the dashboard. If this is your first time with Live Office, have the manual handy. Note that you must go to Excel, not the the Excel sheet in Xcelsius. And you should also be careful not to have Xcelsius and Excel open at the same time if you have Live Office installed.

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Go to the Live Office tab (or menu in Excel 2003) and click Web Intelligence in the Insert section. Locate the report, and the report block, and go through the steps to insert the report block into a set of cell in the Excel spreadsheet. This is where you set connection options, like whether to refresh the Webi report or connect to an instance, and what credentials should be used when connecting to the Webi report. Once you have finished, save the Excel sheet.

Its also worth noting that for any future changes, you will need to export the Excel sheet from Xcelsius, open it up in Excel, and make your Live Office changes there.

QaaWS
With QaaWS, you first create a query using the familiar query panel. QaaWS will convert this into a web services and provide you with a WSDL. This is a URL that points to the definition of the query, which is stored in the Business Objects repository.

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From the Windows start menu, locate Query As A Web Service. Log onto the repository. If youre not sure how, check the help for details. The QaaWS guide that youll find at help.sap.com doesnt actually explain how to create a query. That can be found in Building Queries with SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Query - HTML

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Go through the steps of the wizard to create the query. First Ill create Revenue by Category which is simply one dimension and one measure.

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Next up is Top 10 Cities by Revenue, again, fairly simple since there is a Rank function built in to QaaWS.

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Lastly, we will create the query that returns the top 20 products based on sales for the last three months, and for each shows the average revenue per sale per month, over the last 12 months.

Wait. What? OK, so for QaaWS well just have two queries.

BI Services
A BI Service is like QaaWS, but instead of creating a web service from a query panel, you create a web service from a Webi report block. Although available earlier, BI Services was only really recommended from XI3.1 SP2.5 onwards. In XI3.1 you create your web service in the Web Intelligence Rich Client. In BI4.0, you can follow the same steps in the web client (now called the BI Launch Pad). The help for BI Services in XI3.1 is in the Web Intelligence Rich Client Guide. Ill go into a bit more detail here since BI Services is less well known. 1. Open up the Webi Rich Client, and open your Webi report. Right click on the report block that you want to bring into Xcelsius and click Publish Block

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Click Next.

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Name the block. Your web service will contain a definition for each of the three blocks. You will name the web service in the next step.

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Click Next. Click Create to create a new web service. Give it a name that describes what youre using it for.

8. Click OK. 9. Click OK to the congratulatory message then Finish. 10. Publish the other two blocks. But for these, dont create a new web service, just select the one youve already
created and click Publish.

11. To view the web services that youve created, tick the box next to BI Services in the tool bar.

12. Select the web service that you just created, and copy the WSDL URL from the lower section of the pane.

With these steps complete, you are now in roughly the same position that you are with QaaWS. That is, you have a simple URL that will give Xcelsius access to your data.

Consuming the Data in Xcelsius

Live Office
You now have an Excel file that contains links, via Live Office, to your Webi report blocks. You will first import this spreadsheet into Xcelsius, then add connections in the connections window, to tell Xcelsius to trigger these Live Office connections at the appropriate time (for example, when the dashboard is initially loaded). 1. Open Xcelsius. Click Data > Import and select the spreadsheet with your Live Office connections. Click Data > Connections. Click Add > Live Office Connections. Xcelsius will now find the Live Office connections embedded in the spreadsheet and register them as living things that can be controlled just like other connections. If you have a lot of connections, this can take a while. I find it helpful to watch the CPU since there is no message to tell you when this process is finished. And you can cause trouble if you start making changes to the spreadsheet in the meantime.

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Query as a Web Service

With your web service defined and stored in the repository, now you only need to create a connection to that web service and define what cells the output belongs in. 1. Open Xcelsius. Click Data > Connections. Click Add > Query as a Web Service. Paste the WSDL into the WSDL URL field and click import.

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This URL can be found in the QaaWS interface when you have your web service selected.

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Now bind the output of the connection to the cells in your spreadsheet.

Repeat these steps for each query/web service.

BI Services
The steps here are the same as for QaaWS, except that there is only one URL. So 1. Open Xcelsius Click Data > Connections Click Add > Query as a Web Service (yes, you use the QaaWS connection. If you select the Web Service connection type, you wont get the nice credentials mapping built into the QaaWS connection type). Paste the URL from the Webi Rich Client into the WSDL URL field and click Import. Note that in the Method drop-down you will have two entries for each of the Webi blocks that you published in the web service. One for simply fetching the data, and one for drilling through the data as though you were drilling in Webi. Theres a post over here explaining how to set up drill-down with BI Services. Bind the output to the cells in your spreadsheet.

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Repeat these steps to create two more connections, using the same URL, but selecting a different method (report block) for each set of data.

Wrap Up
Setup Time
Live Office takes the longest to set up, followed by BI Services, since both have Webi as the middle-man. Live Office requires that you install the Live Office software (which is not part of the client tools package). BI Services requires that you fire up the Webi Rich Client (in XI3.1), QaaWS needs only a query. Winner: Query as a Web Service.

Response Time
QaaWS connects live to a data source. The response times will be as slow as this data source is large. This might be a few seconds for smaller queries, but can easily grow. Its a good idea to get an idea of how fast the response times are from your data source to help you decide if QaaWS suits your dashboard. Live Office and BI Services can both connect to a scheduled instance of a Webi report. This means that it simply doesnt matter how big your original data source is. It only matters how much data is in the report block (not strictly true! If youre filtering/drilling on your Webi report from Xcelsius, size will matter, but thats out of scope for today). Despite the similarity though, BI Services seems much faster. Its anecdotal, but I can can get 10 BI Services connections refreshing in under a few seconds, whilst the same with Live Office takes closer to 10 seconds. A single BI Services connection with around 20 cells of data will refresh in a fraction of a second. Winner: BI Services

Flexibility
While QaaWS is quick to set up, its limited in the complexity of data that it can return. Since both Live Office and BI Services connect to a Webi report, you have the full suite of Webi analysis functions at your fingertips. But whereas BI Services will only connect to a Webi report, Live Office will also connect to a Crystal report. Winner: Live Office So, by the numbers, it looks like we have a tie. Luckily I have a personal favourite. And so, my advice is this: if your data source is in a Crystal report, use Live Office. If you data requirements are very simple, use Query as a Web Service. Otherwise, use BI Services.

One more thing

As though this post wasnt long enough, it is worth mentioning that QaaWS is now essentially built into Xcelsius. Ive written a post on using queries directly from Xcelsius (aka Dashboard Design) in BI4.0, which youll find here.