Let us assume your organization has a vast number of published Analytics Cloud Stories, Analytic Applications, and Digital Boardrooms. It will help if you aim to make such content accessible to the end-users in an easily discoverable way using the Catalog feature available in the SAP Analytics Cloud home page. In this blog, you will see how to make your ‘Production Planning Dashboard’ application accessible to end-users.

Pre-requisites for the Catalog feature

Before you can use this feature, enable the following administrative settings.

• Go to Main Menu -> System -> Administration -> Catalog
• In the Visible Tabs section, switch ‘Catalog and Publishing to the Catalog’ to On

Publish your content to the Catalog

Navigate to your ‘Production Planning Dashboard’ from the file repository, click on the share icon, and select the Publish to Catalog option, as shown in the below image.

A dialog box will appear. Here, add the teams you want to publish the content.

Click on the Edit details button to enrich the card with details.

• Add a relevant title for the card.
• Add relevant tags that will help end-users to search for this content. Logically added tags would reduce the time taken to find the content.
• Add a description of your choice, which will give some detail about your application.
• The source link gets included by default in the Link section.
• Click on the Save icon and preview the details visible in the content card. Details like last changed on, by and views are pre-populated on the card.

Enrich content card with references

What if there are KPI definition documents that you want your end-user to refer? What if you are going to route them to an external site to raise an incident if they find a discrepancy? How do end-users jump to the existing Inventory WEBI Dashboard for reference? You can enable all these using the following two categories of reference links.

• Analytics Cloud File – you can add a reference link for any Story, Digital Boardroom, Analytical Application, or any PDF, Excel uploaded to the file repository.
• 3^rd– Party Link – you can add external URL objects like WEBI report links, service now incident creation link, etc.

The end-user will use these links when they click on the Open button from the Catalog tab’s content card.

Navigating through the Catalog

You will find a card for each published content in the Catalog tab. You can search your ‘Production Planning Dashboard’ using either of the following options:

• Filter option – You can use the filters created by the administrator. ‘Content-Type’ filter is available by default segregating the content between Stories, Analytic Applications, etc.
• Search option – You can search the title or part of it in the search option. Here, the end-user can also search the tags put by the content owner while publishing. E.g., in this case, ‘Factory Reporting’ can be used.
• Recently added option – You can sort the content based on views or alphabetical sort.

Customize URLs for shared content.

Let us say that you want to share your ‘Production Planning Dashboard’ with your manager. You want him to understand what you have shared by looking at the link in the mail. Here, use the Customize Link option.

Navigate to your application from the file repository, click on the share icon, and select the Share option, as shown below.

A dialog box will appear. Here,

• Add your manager as the user.
• Select the access you want to give.
• Click on the Customize Link option and provide a self-explanatory description for the link and click Share.

Add External Content

What if SAC is not your only BI platform? You may want your end-users to use SAC applications and access related content from your BOBJ platform. To make this easy, you can use the External Content feature.

• Add the External Content from the Home page as shown in the below image.
• Give a name and description for the content and paste the URL.

If you are looking to combine your Analytics Cloud content, external content, or non-SAP content in a single, user-friendly interface, use the Analytics Catalog feature. You can make Catalog the default Home page tab using administrative settings. You can create filters like line of business (LoBs), teams, regions, functional areas, etc., to make content discovery easier.

The Analytics Catalog feature will enhance the content access experience for end-users while helping them spend less time tracking the content and more time exploring it.

Click here to evaluate if SAP Analytics Cloud is right for you. If you are interested in learning more about SAP Analytics Cloud, please check out our blog series here.