Using a BI Workspace (formerly known as Dashboard Builder), which is part of the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform to organize your dashboards, allows users to customize the look and feel of how dashboards are accessed. In addition, administrators can control access to each navigational layout. When we house dashboards in a BI Workspace, users don't have to navigate through numerous folders in order to reach their desired dashboard, but instead use web page style links to access their dashboard.
In our example, we will set up a BI Workspace, which will contain links to three dashboards.
Make sure you have your dashboards created and saved on the SAP BI Platform. Refer to the previous recipe, Publishing to SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, to learn how to do this. In our example, we use three dashboards, as shown in the following screenshot:
As you can see, when we set up a BI Workspace, it is easier to access the dashboards rather than clicking through a bunch of folders. You can think of a BI Workspace as a container that holds a set of dashboards.
There are some more neat things that you can accomplish with BI Workspaces.
In the General section of the Preferences menu of BI Launchpad, we can define how the Home tab for BI Launchpad should look. We can set a BI Workspace as the home tab with the following steps. So, when the user logs in to BI Launchpad, they will instantly see the BI Workspace.
BI Workspaces not only support dashboards but other BI documents such as Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence Reports, and even websites!
A BI Workspace has the option to set up communication between the different documents. This allows the passing of values between documents that are placed on the same tab in a BI Workspace. For example, a selection made in a dashboard can lead to a change of data in a Web Intelligence document.
This feature lies outside the scope of this book, but you can check the BI Workspaces user guide by SAP for more information.
You can find the BI Workspaces User Guide at http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4_bi_workspace_user_en.pdf.