If you ever wanted your SAP output screens to be presentation-ready, SAP Digital Boardroom is exactly what you need. SAP, as usual, pushes the frontier of what’s doable in analytics and data. They have developed SAP Digital Boardroom in response to clients’ requests for an easy way to communicate data across an entire gathering. SAP Digital Boardroom offers clients the chance to develop individually managed “boardrooms” that display data related to a particular subset of the company’s data.

SAP Digital Boardroom hopes to provide a simple way for businesses to consolidate the data they want to share. Data can be drawn from multiple sources, and even from siloed data or data lakes, and transformed in real-time into something impressive and engaging. Each page that SAP Digital Boardroom uses draws from the SAP Analytics Cloud and is consolidated on a dedicated screen showing the relevant metrics. The presentation layer for SAP Digital Boardroom supports responsive pages and can display data in canvas and grid format. One downside is that, even though the display supports these different modes, the screen behavior may be unexpected on more prominent display screens.

Splitting the Difference

Another critical innovation that SAP Digital Boardroom brings to the fore is the ability to split the displays among one or more monitors. The presenter can determine which presentation screen goes on which display. There is no limitation on the number of displays you can access so that presenters can split their dashboards into multiple displays across several rooms. Multiple screens can even span different rooms, allowing a presenter to simultaneously access different cohorts within the company.

SAP Digital Boardroom is designed for a layout with several displays. Within most boardrooms, businesses have multiple displays that may be useful in tracking news, ticker prices, or the price of materials. SAP Digital Boardroom allows a company to repurpose this, using data from the SAP Analytics cloud to display real-time information on the business. This is an innovative method of keeping board members in touch with what’s going on with the company.

But what if you don’t have as many screens as the boardroom software was designed to take? Luckily, you can access each screen through a traditional swipe mechanism. Each dashboard is visible at the top of the screen, and a presenter can easily switch between them, even pulling back when they want to review the previous screen. If you’re more comfortable using navigation buttons, SAP provides a handy set in the bottom left corner of the screen that performs the same purpose.

Advanced Presentation Tricks

If you’ve sat in on a presentation before, you know that switching back and forth between screens can be a chore. However, most presentation software allows you to swap between multiple screens easily. SAP Digital Boardroom offers this functionality through “jumps.” Jumps can be set up manually to traverse back and forth between different presentation screens at the presenter’s choice. Because of their configuration, they are only available to the boardroom user on demand, so they aren’t triggered automatically or accidentally.

Jumps can be defined either by screen, chart, or even widget, allowing the presenter a significant level of control. Overview pages work particularly well with jumps. These overviews tend to have a series of data represented. With jumps, a presenter can move from the outline to a particular graph or table and back seamlessly. In this way, a presenter can display pertinent information without losing its connection to the overall presentation of data.

The Context Menu

One of the most powerful additions to SAP Digital Boardroom is the context menu, which can be accessed via a long press on any chart or element on the screen. The context menu offers several options:

• Dashboard opens the boardroom content structure.
• Preferences offer ways to change the display settings.
• Search opens a simple search function that accesses all elements of the boardroom.
• Filter is usable alongside a chart or table, allowing the presenter to filter for the elements they want to show.
• If there’s a jump attached to a widget or screen, the “Jump To…” command allows a presenter to access it.
• Chart Actions allow for story-designed chart actions to be executed on command.
• Explorer can also be opened from the context menu.
• The VDT button allows for further interactions if a value driver tree is attached to the presentation.

Tree Structure

In addition to the context menu, there’s also a different method of navigation known as the tree structure. As most users of SAP know, tree structures make up a lot of our data access. In SAP Digital Boardroom, the tree structure can be displayed anywhere on the presentation screen for easy access.

Designing a Boardroom

The boardroom is designed in a specialized environment. The visual environment allows the presenter to set up the screen order and jumps between screens, widgets, and other display screens. Edit mode will enable presenters to graphically overview the interactions between multiple screens and widgets. From there, they can edit and change those interactions as they see fit.

There are man technical aspects of implementing the SAP Digital Boardroom, with many tools at your fingertips for customizing design and structure. You can find a useful checklist in this blog post. If you have any questions and comments, please leave them below!

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