What about using live data from your Salesforce.com reports in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to create interactive dashboards to show, track, and analyze your sales activities? DashConn is an add-on by IdeaCrop for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards that delivers this integration. Let's have a look at the features of this add-on and how to set it up.
As we are connecting to Salesforce.com, you will obviously need a Salesforce.com Developer account. You can sign up for a free account at http://developer.salesforce.com/signup.
To connect to Salesforce.com from a dashboard in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, you will require a security token. You can get this security token from the Personal Setup menu at Salesforce.com.
You can download a free trial version of the DashConn add-on from the IdeaCrop website, http://www.ideacrop.com/.
The Salesforce.com DataViewer component does most of the work for us. As you have seen, we only had to enter our Salesforce.com credentials, select a report, and preview the dashboard to see how the data will be returned. After binding the fields of the Data Output tab, we can reuse the report data in other components.
The Salesforce.com DataViewer component has some nice runtime features to drill down or up in the report data, open the Salesforce.com details page of all selected items, set filters, and aggregate data by a certain field. With these options, you can dynamically change the data being retrieved by the Salesforce.com DataViewer component. This also means that the values in spreadsheet cells that are bound to the Main result destination field in the Data Output tab change as well.
To conclude this recipe, we will discuss two more options: the Data Manager Connection and Working Mode settings.
A very nice feature of this add-on is that it also has a Connection option that is available from the Data Manager. With this Connection, you can use Salesforce.com report data in your dashboards without having to use the Salesforce.com DataViewer component. Another important feature of the Connection option is that it offers the ability to constantly refresh data from Salesforce.com reports—just like other Connection options—without being prompted for credentials.
Except for the Usage tab, most settings are similar to those of the Salesforce.com DataViewer component.
In the Behavior tab of the component and Data Manager Connection, you can find the Working Mode setting, as seen in the following screenshot. In the default Online setting, an Internet connection is required to use the component to connect to Salesforce.com. In Offline mode, the (first level of) report data is embedded within the dashboard.
The third Online/ fallback to Offline mode is a combination of the online and offline modes and will try to retrieve live data first; but if this fails, it uses the embedded data.