Hello Friends!
It's been a long time since I posted anything on SCN. SAP BusinessObjects Cloud is now my homebase. I switched from Product Management back to Engineering about a year ago focusing on Location Analytics and it has been a refreshing ride so far. But it also means that I rarely have time for blogs. Well better late than never. I don't know how long it will take to catch up to all the capabilities we released in the last 8 months. One way to find out is start posting them 
Basemap
SAP provides 10 out of box basemaps provided by our partner Esri, including Open Street Map. You can change the opacity of the basemap of even hide the basemap in your final presentation.
Layer Panel
Ability to overlay multiple layers of the same or different types is a basic functionality. It allows you to work with a single map and visualize different levels of information.
Bubble Layer
Bubble layer is the most basic layer which displays points on your map based on the geographic coordinates. You need to have a unique ID column and latitude and longitude columns in your data. Optionally you can also associate a column as a default tooltip field to this ID called location ID. SAP BusinessObjects Cloud creates a location dimension in its unique way using the location ID, latitude, longitude, and tooltip which allows you to perform spatial operations. You will learn why the way we model location dimension is an important differentiator the more you use SAP BusinessObjects Cloud location analytics feature.
Customize
Once you have the basic bubbles to show up from your data, start customizing your analysis.
- Bubble Color: Color by a measure or a calculated measure
- Bubble Size: Size by a measure or a calculated measure
- Tooltip Information: Add additional dimensions or measures to the tooltip that appears when you hover over a point. Note that you can specify a default tooltip at modelling time. This feature allows you to add 5 more fields.
- Tooltip Chart: Add additional details for a given point as a chart representation. Chart appears when you click on a point
Polygon Filter
It's now time to play with the chart. If you have too many points and want to filter it down to an area you are particularly interested in, try one of our polygon filters. You can draw a free form,, circle, or rectangle shape. Click on and drag a vertex to change the shape as you see fit. I like the way the circle polygon pops up.
I did this last year on my Christmas break. It uses several other layers which you will soon want to try out
Linked Analysis
Once you had fun discovering your artistic potential, you can move onto more serious analysis. For instance, you can filter on a map and drive the filter onto other visualization widgets (map, chart or table), to a page level filter, or a global story filter. Map can also receive filter selection when it is within the scope of the group, page or story filter. Collectively we call these capabilities Linked Analysis. Create a chart and a table next to the map or in another page and define the scope of Linked Analysis from the right hand panel.
Multiple Models
Do you have more than one data that you want to analyze at the same time? No problem. Bring on other data and add it to a new layer. You can overlay models of the same or different types, including the data on cloud and from remote server, as long as they are supported for SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.
Gem: Custom Colors and Key Performance Indicator definition
The color palette and range selector our team developed for SAP BusinessObjects Cloud map is a powerful little gem. It has been in the product since our very first release in 2015 and is still one of my favourites. It was in the early stage of my move back to leading development and I felt truly inspired by the level of attention the team showed to produce great user experience. With the custom color palette function and range selector control, you can
- Choose from a wide range of gradient or discrete color palettes
- Add and customize your own palette
- Swap the color palette around with a simple click
- Define measure ranges in percentile or value and assign colors in two ways:
- Click on the control to add a pointer, drag, edit and delete the pointer
- Use the Ranges drop down to evenly divide into the number of ranges and then making adjustments as needed
Recently we released more advanced conditional formatting which can be shared across the story or model in addition to the map level function. Please refer to the latest product documentation. If I feel courageous to tackle more blogs I may post something about it 
Advanced
On the Bubble Layer you may have noticed a section titled Advanced. This is related to an automatic clustering feature which gets enabled when your model has over 5000 points. This is a topic that deserves its own coverage together with upcoming plans in the works.
This is it for this blog. Apologies if you are not into silent recording. I actually didn't realize uploading snippets of recording requires posting on a public video sites. Re-doing them will mean that we will never past the base map and bubble layer so I am going to wrap up here. Thanks for understanding
Sharon