“Let’s say you want to track down Steve Jobs and tell him, at great length, just how Apple’s smug advertising is destroying your faith in humanity. There’s an app for that!”
If only.
If you’re the proud owner of an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a Palm Pre – or even if you just use some of the better known pieces of business software – you will, no doubt, have been bombarded recently with messages of integration. If you’re not simultaneously posting pictures to Facebook with your phone, tweeting via Outlook and curing cancer with a Speak & Spell then you should be wondering what it is you’ve been doing with your time. Every day there’s a new plug-in that’s going to let you operate your toaster via SMS and you start to wonder if there’s some global conspiracy to create solutions for problems that don’t exist.
So it’s all the more pleasant when a piece of functionality comes along that does something really useful and provides a link between two disparate, but related elements.
Business Objects Live Office is such a piece of functionality. It’s a plugin for Microsoft Office that allows you to embed your reports into Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
Which I think is pretty cool when you start to think about the possibilities for the way you disseminate the reports you create. Imagine being able to create a document, embed your report, and have the data in that report be live, refreshable, not just a snapshot at a particular time.
Obviously this has implications for users of Westbury’s solution because we use Business Objects as our front-end client, and we’re planning to have a video demo of the Live Office integration in the next few weeks so you can really see it in action.
Until then you can find out more at the SAP website.
Keep your eyes peeled for the demo video over at http://westbury-it.com
Tom
