Collaboration in SAP Analytics Cloud

former_member751461 · ‎2020 Nov 20

Make better business decisions, together.

It isn't a well-kept secret that team collaboration greatly influences your organization’s success. When your team works efficiently together, your company is more likely to flourish. That is why SAP Analytics Cloud contains a variety of enterprise analytics and collaboration tools that were designed to ensure you and your teammates are always on the same page.

Let's look at the various collaboration tools that will help everyone in your organization make better business decisions, together:

Creating Teams

Creating teams in SAP Analytics Cloud is just one of the many ways you can efficiently collaborate with your team. To create a team in SAP Analytics Cloud:

Go to the SAP Analytics Cloud home page and click Security in the menu bar.

After, select the plus icon and enter your team name and description.

Under System Folder, select Create a Folder to add a folder where you will store all your team files.

In the Members area, use Add Members to search for existing users to add them to the team.

Once you’ve selected your team members and added the necessary details, you can choose Create.

Once you have created a team, you can share stories or files in the system. This is great because you can share a story with all members of a team without having to tediously assign users one by one.

To learn more on how to create and manage your teams, click here.

Calendar

In SAP Analytics Cloud, the calendar is another powerful tool that you can use to collaborate seamlessly with your colleagues. With the calendar, you can create tasks, assign tasks to other users, and set due dates. Here, you can also check upcoming tasks. Depending on your preferences, you can display your tasks and processes either in a Calendar or a Gannt style view.

Another way you can use the calendar is to create and approve processes. In SAP Analytics Cloud, a process is an aggregation of all your tasks, providing you with a high-level view of how much work is completed and how much still needs to get done. This is a great way to check your overall team progress when working on your analytic scenarios.

Notifications

Have you ever forgotten about an important task? Well, the notification feature in SAP Analytics Cloud will ensure you stay up to date with your projects. You can set up notifications to notify you when users are invited to join a discussion, when a comment is added to a shared story, and when reminders and tasks become due.

To access your notifications, choose Notifications on the main toolbar. Notifications can also be read by users with the SAP Analytics Cloud mobile app and sent to users by email. After you read a notification, you can delete it by selecting the X icon that appears when you hover over it. If you want to delete all notifications, select the Delete All Notifications icon.

Discussions

The Discussions feature allows you to communicate with your team, in real-time or through notifications. To start a discussion:

Simply click on the Collaboration icon on the top right-hand corner of the screen. This will open the Discussions side panel.

From here, you can either click on an existing discussion to view previous conversations or click on the plus icon to start a new discussion.

When starting a discussion, you can add as many team members as needed. Only people who have been invited can see the discussion. There are many other amazing collaborative features within discussions including:

Roles: With this new roles feature, Tenant Admins can control who has the priviledge to access certain content in discussions and comments. To access this feature, go to Security > Roles and then choose read or create.
- Read: Allows users to view all discussions and contribute to discussions
- Create: Allows new discussions to be created

Adding attachments: You can add any relevant attachments to your discussions. These attachments can be files stored within your application or files from your desktop.

Links: In the discussion, you can also add links to your analytic stories. To learn how to link to a story within a discussion, check out this article.

Creating new tasks: Lastly, you can create and assign new tasks to yourself or to other members of your team directly in the discussion. When you create a task, your assignee will be automatically notified in the application. To assign a task to a colleague or yourself, click on New Task. If you would like to start a new process instead, click New Process from the same side panel.

Comments

The last collaborative feature we are going to discuss is comments. In SAP Analytics Cloud, you can add comments to your stories, analytic applications, and to a data point in a table cell.

To add a comment to a story page, on the page tab bar, select the drop-down menu and choose Comment > Place Comment. Enter your comment in the displayed dialog box.

To add a comment to a story widget, select the widget and choose the Comment icon. Enter your comment in the displayed dialog box and select Place Comment.

To add a comment to a data point, select the desired data cell, and right-click to select Add Comment. Here, a comment dialog will be displayed where you can enter your comment. For more information on adding comments to a data point, refer to our help guide here.

In your comments, you can also mention a specific user who you would like to direct the towards by adding (@) <username> in the comment—just like you would in social media!

Once the comment is posted, a comment icon is displayed at the top right of the widget or page tab bar. It’s important to note that the comment icon and comment thread will fade away if the story is not set to Comment Mode.

Schedule Publications

With Schedule Publications, you can create a schedule for sharing your stories and analytic applications with specific users via email. You can either choose to create a single schedule or a recurring schedule, which you can later view, modify, or delete an occurrence or a recurrence of the schedule. With a single schedule, you can generate multiple publications and each publication can be sent to both SAP Analytics Cloud and Non-SAP Analytics Cloud users. Note that scheduled publications for non-SAP Analytics Cloud recipients has an input maximum of three.

To ensure the right people are receiving the right information at the right time, you can schedule and share customized views of your story in the form of Bookmarks or Views. This allows you to personalize your content to specific users and ensure the people are receiving the information that is most relevant to them.

To create a schedule publication, open your story and select the Share button in the toolbar. Then, select Schedule Publication.

This will open the Schedule Publication dialog box. From here, you can choose the start date and the time for your publication, alongside the subject field for your email. You can also set recurrences for your publication, where you can establish how often you would like your content to be published.

For a detailed, step by step guide on creating a Schedule Publication, check out this guide.