Articles

Leading Article

Current Trends in Reporting

Reporting has been characterized by buzz words like "data mining" and "slice and dice" in the past. A new trend is "analytical applications" – see our first article for this. The second article provides a comprehensive overview over the different aspects of reporting, starting with the user view, but also covering more technical issues.

Content

Content is the most important ingredient of reports. In her article, JoAnn Hackos presents the hub-and-spokes model: a non-hierarchical method of providing structure to information and a promising approach to assisting the user in identifying relationships among data. Contents has primarily been structured information in the past. Today's systems have to cope with unstructured information as well.

 

Previous Editions: Edition 2 (published 12 December, 2000) • See the Disclaimer Below


Reporting – Turning Data into Information

In this second edition of the SAP Design Guild, renowned experts outside SAP as well as SAP experts discuss the emerging new role of reporting. Reporting has been one of the two cornerstones of SAP software in the past, the other one being applications. Today, however, with the rise of the World Wide Web, the two aspects of information, which reporting stands for, and function, which applications stand for, blend together into a coherent whole, residing on the medium "Web page" – be it on traditional Web sites or in the new portals. Especially within companys, corporate portals have become the "great integrators" of functionality and information.

decoration imageBut this edition does not stop here. There are other new trends in reporting, like analytical applications and new visualization techniques, which arouse quite a lot of excitement and therefore are also covered in articles.

For your convenience, the articles are subsumed under different subjects, which are introduced in short.

Read more on "Reporting – Turning Data into Information"

 

Disclaimer: Please note that this edition was written in 2000. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding strategy, and organizational structure, may no longer be valid.