Make sure your dashboard is complete and ready for sharing.

When we export a dashboard to the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, we store it in the repository. From there, we can control accessibility to the dashboard and make sure that we have one source of of the actual dashboard instead of sending out multiple dashboards through e-mail and possibly getting mixed up with what is the latest version. When we log in to BI Launchpad it also passes the login token to the dashboard, so we don't have to enter our credentials again when connecting to SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform data. This is important because we don't have to manually create and pass any additional tokens once we have logged in.

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards supports saving a dashboard offline at runtime. This means that a user can create an offline snapshot of the dashboard that contains data retrieved at the time of saving and store that copy on their local machine. When doing this, all external data connections are disabled and connectivity-related components, such as the Connection Refresh Button, are also disabled.

Enabling offline dashboards is easy. Go to File | Document Properties and select the Allow This Dashboard to be Used Offline option.

To save the dashboard while running it, right-click anywhere on the background of the dashboard and click Save Current Copy of Dashboard to Local Disk.

To give a true website type feel, developers can house their dashboards in a website type format using a BI Workspace. This in turn provides a better experience for users, as they don't have to navigate through many folders in order to access the dashboard that they are looking for.