Our launch customer for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.0 has been using DS 1.0 for some time now against their SAP BW environment (not on HANA). The customer was very pleased with Design Studio 1.0 as it allowed them to create dash boards across very large and complex data sets - something that BO Dashboards (Xcelsius) was struggling with.
When version 1.1 became GA, our customer installed this software with high expectations of new improved features and an even better charts engine.
They converted their main management dashboards to the new 1.1 version and put them up for testing.
However, their first reaction was one of extreme disappointment (and that is me being as positive as I can be - I think utterly furious was closer to the truth).
The main issues are:
1 - all charts have lost their glossy style and are now "flat" in appearance and the previously available styles are gone
2 - charts no longer wrap the x-axis descriptions, if text is too long it simply isn't shown anymore
3 - legends no longer have titles
4 - you can not define where the legend is shown in relation to the chart, it now always appears on the same upper right corner
5 - legend descriptions no longer wrap, they are just truncated
The new mouse-over view of the descriptions is nice but does not offset the loss of functionality described above.
Yes, CSS is supported but our customer is not going to re-develop the previous styles as CSS - if we go down that route than why bother purchasing tools like BusinessObjects at all?
The real issue is that version 1.1 has removed vital functionality from 1.0 - thus crippling existing management dashboards.
(Losing the legend descriptions and the disappearing x-axis descriptions has rendered a number of key charts completely useless.)
Our client really wants to know if something went wrong with their upgrade to Design Studio 1.1 or if the above described behaviour is indeed "as-is" with the new version?
If the latter is true - is there any roadmap that tell us when we are going to re-gain all the features that we have lost before?
Unless something went wrong with the upgrade to 1.1, then it does seem that this new version is one step forward and ten steps backwards?
Any comments and thoughts would be much appreciated, especially from those who have been using version 1.0 and are now using 1.1 - are we missing something here?