Note

Xcelsius, in its original conception, was a way to build visualizations and dashboards using Excel data. Over the past several years, SAP Business Objects has enhanced Xcelsius into a full-featured enterprise ready dashboard solution that works with any data source. As SAP continued on its mission to make Xcelsius a dashboard product to serve all its customers (beyond being just a personal productivity tool), the name Xcelsius was no longer meaningful or relevant. The BI market and SAP customers were also demanding an enterprise dashboard solution for the types of projects they were using Xcelsius for; that is dashboards for thousands of users. By changing the name Xcelsius to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP is showing its commitment to delivering a solution that serves the needs of all BI customers as well as aligning the name to the product's growing capabilities and roadmap.

The SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards portfolio consists of several different packages (see the edition comparison on next page). In this book we use Dashboard Design to refer to the tooling itself.