360Suite: 2021 In A Nutshell

A Look-Back At 2021 For The 360Suite Solutions 

What a year it has been for the 360Suite solutions; a lot of great new features to help our customers get the most out of their SAP BusinessObjects investment. Let’s take it from the top: 

360Bind And 360Cast Available In The Web Platform

This year we added 360Bind and 360Cast to the Web Platform to have parity of products between the Web Platform and the Legacy version of 360Suite. With this, there are now more products and even more features in the Web Platform than the Legacy version. As a reminder, the Legacy version is no longer supported since September 30, 2021. It will therefore not be patched in the context of the Log4j vulnerability. We recommend you update your products to the latest versions to benefit from the latest features, and invulnerability to Log4j. Read the official statement here.

360Eyes For SAP Data Services

360Eyes for SAP Data Services is a brand new product released this year. It works exactly the same way as our 360Eyes product for SAP BusinessObjects; we simply connect your SAP Data Services repositories, extract metadata, you can then document your repository using Web Intelligence documents, plus run an impact analysis to check data flows, etc. This product allows you to anticipate problems that the ETL could cause to your BI, comply with regulatory requirements, and of course, reduce your maintenance costs. To learn more, click here. 

Our First-Ever API Is Released

Just after the summer of this year, we released our first-ever API for 360Suite to allow our customers who work in a fully automated agile way to use the same knowledge and methods as they would with GIT/Jenkins for example, within the 360Suite Web Platform.  Let’s take an example:

You have Web Intelligence documents that can only be accessed by users with a certain level of clearance. Who can and cannot access the information contained in these documents is defined in a 3rd party application outside of your Identity Provider such as Active Directory. You would like to make sure that at all times, the SAP BusinessObjects security is synchronized with the external application. Thanks to the API and a bit of standard scripting you could easily automate the following process without manual interventions:

• Extract the list of users who have the right privileges
• Create a task in 360Suite
• Execute the task

More Collaboration Capabilities

Today, organizations cannot be agile without collaboration with developers or end-users. Within the 360Suite solutions, you can now send notifications to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and any other integrations that support webhooks.  

Improved User Experience

A lot of work has been carried out to improve the overall user experience of our solutions this year, including:

• Updates to the libraries we use on the interface
• Simplified processes
• Fewer clicks
• More shortcuts 
• Use of double-clicks
• A new notification center to push information to you

Enhancement Requests

We love getting enhancement requests from our customers and this year we have released dozens of new features thanks to you, our customers. You can access all the new features by browsing our releases notes.

What’s To Come In 2022

2022 is nearly upon us and we already have some exciting new ideas in our roadmap for the 360Suite solutions: 

Listening To Our Customers

First of all, we will continue to put our customers first and consider all your enhancements requests, so please do continue to send them through to us. 

Automation Automation Automation

We will continue to further improve our APIs allowing you to automate even more tasks within SAP BusinessObjects. 

Making 360Suite More Intelligent

360Suite is a powerful set of solutions but we’d like to make them even more intelligent. Currently, we rely on you to set everything up such as your tasks in order to start using the solutions, so we want to make it more readily available. For example, we’ll offer templates and wizards to help you get started, sending you smart recommendations and allowing you to act on them automatically at the touch of a button.

SAP BusinessObjects Private Cloud Edition Ready

SAP has introduced a private cloud to host and manage SAP BusinessObjects and we are the preferred partner to help you move to SAP PCE. Our solutions can accelerate the process and make sure everything moves across successfully. 

360Init Will Move To The Web Platform

Next year, 360Init will become part of the Web Platform. 360Init is a solution that allows you to import and manage a security model from an Excel Template. It provides the obvious benefit of saving time on implementation, the mitigation of risks, the possibility to test changes in a non-prod environment and also the capacity to document it and share it outside of your team for auditing purposes. It’s a great security solution and will be available in February 2022.

New Capabilities For 360Bind

360Bind is our automated testing solution. At the moment it will compare your WebI or Crystal Reports across time, version, or environment. Next year we plan to release the ability to compare the data held in the WebI report against the data held in the database using SQL statements. 

360Eyes In The Web Platform

360Eyes will be added to the Web Platform next year to make the installation, configuration, and support a lot easier. It will remain exactly the same product so existing customers will not be impacted but it will allow for more extended capabilities. 

So, what do you think?

2021 has seen lots of new functionalities added to the 360Suite solutions and we hope our customers are enjoying them as much as we did in creating them. 2022 sets to be another exciting year and we are looking forward to being able to extend the 360Suite capabilities even more. If you’d like a demo or have any questions about any of the new releases, feel free to get in contact using the chat on your right.