Altek Solutions

Casting Director is a plugin to the SAP BusinessObjects platform that provides dynamic scheduling capabilities, and additional delivery options and formats not available through the core platform.

Centralized, Dynamic Report Scheduling

Casting Director can read its scheduling information from a Microsoft Excel file, Web Intelligence report, Desktop Intelligence report, or Crystal Report. Leveraging these reports allows for scheduling information to be centralized in any database that SAP BusinessObjects can connect to.

You can also utilize the SAP BusinessObjects universe semantic layer to combine scheduling data with other data sources, such as address lists, to dynamically generate report schedules and distribtuions based upon your data. Essentially, Casting Director allows you to use all of the power of SAP BusinessObjects to generate your report schedules.

What can Casting Director do for me?

This flexibility provides for diverse distribution options, many of which are not available from the core platform:

• Report packages processed overnight and automatically sent to a user's SAP BusinessObjects or email inbox
• Reports sent as HTML emails to mobile devices such as a Blackberry
• PDF files uploaded via FTP to an Intranet/Extranet web server
• Paper reports automatically printed overnight
• Customer statements dynamically generated and emailed
• Nightly reports automatically copied to a secure directory where they can be offloaded for disaster recovery and compliance purposes

Distribution Options

Using a simple and concise syntax, schedule entries can be:

• Saved to a local disk, network disk, NAS or SAN
• Uploaded to an FTP server
• Emailed internally or externally
• Printed to any network printer
• Sent to a user’s SAP BusinessObjects inbox
• Published to the SAP BusinessObjects repository
• Published as HTML to a web server

Supported Formats

Depending on the method of delivery and the type of report, content can be sent in a variety of formats, including:

• Native SAP BusinessObjects format
• Adobe Acrobat (PDF)
• Microsoft Excel (XLS)
• CSV
• XML
• HTML
• and more...

Dynamic Report Naming

Casting Director also provides for dynamic naming of documents it creates. Dynamic fields such as date/time, prompt values, or report variables can be combined with static values to generate the desired name. These naming conventions can be applied to entire schedule entries or to individual schedule actions, providing a flexible method for naming.

For example, one might use the following delivery name:

• “Annual Report ” + <DateTime_yyyy> + ” for ” + <Customer>

Once processed, the resulting document name might look something like

• “Annual Report 2006 for Acme Inc”

Leverages Your Business Objects Deployment

Since Casting Director itself exists as a program object in your SAP BusinessObjects environment, it can be run manually or scheduled using the platform. Plus, upgrading to future releases of Casting Director is as simple as uploading a single new file to your SAP BusinessObjects repository.

Security is also handled by SAP BusinessObjects – give Casting Director to a handful of power users or keep it locked down for just the Administrator. The scheduling data itself is separate from the SAP BusinessObjects environment, so changes to the environment do not affect the data, and report schedules are never “lost”.

Learn More

With Casting Director, you can leverage the complete power of SAP BusinessObjects to provide dynamic, easy-to-manage report scheduling and publishing for your organization. To learn more about Casting Director or to see a demo, please contact us at info@alteksolutions.com or call us toll free at (877) 844-7476.