TM1 & CAFE

[cardantim]

Does anybody have experience working with TM1 and CAFE? Coming off of CAFE/Powerplay configuration and hoping that TM1/CAFE solution is much better.

[Marcus Scherer]

I did some prototyping with TM1 and CAFE but I didn't see any CAFE features that Perspectives as Excel frontend wouldn't bring along. Sometimes end users insist on the look and feel, OK.
You need to be aware that with TM1 and CAFE you have to publish your cube first through Framework Manager whereas with Perspectives you have a direct connection to the cubes.

You may also check first the pros and cons of TM1 vs. PP and what cube approach fits your requirements better. There are many topics in this forum about the pros of TM1. PP advantages may be constant perfomance through pre-aggregation, offline-work an -design capability.

best regards,

[RJ!]

Hi Guys (and Girls),

Is CAFE exclusively available for Servers that are on the "Cloud"?
Below is a quote from one of our Tech people, it doesn't seem right from what I have read so far...

It was my understanding that CAFÉ was only applicable to servers that were hosted on the “cloud”. This would not be applicable to us since we have and manage our own physical servers.
Also I vaguely recall something about needing Cognos BI in addition to TM1 in order to utilize the CAFÉ.

From what I have read CAFE is just an addin that you can give to users to connect to the TM1 Application Server, no Cloud or Cognos BI required.

Thanks,

Jason

[Paul Segal]

You're right, your tech person is wrong. CAFE is an Excel add-in, as Perspectives is an Excel add-in (but obviously with different capabilities).

[stephen waters]

Coming off of CAFE/Powerplay configuration and hoping that TM1/CAFE solution is much better.

Out of interest, can you tell us the problems with the CAFÉ/Powerplay combination. Also, if you tell us what you are trying to achieve, you may get some more specific advice.

CAFÉ has better performance over the web than Perspectives (not sure how it compares to the 10.2 TM1 Web) which is why it is a key part of the IBM cloud offering. In addition, I believe you can use CAFÉ to combine TM1 and relational reporting. Apart from those factors I cannot current see benefits over Perspectives\TM1 Web.

This situation may change in the future if they incorporate a formula based approach to CAFÉ

[PlanningDev]

CAFE Points of Note
1. You DO NOT need to publish your cubes through FM when using the TM1 enabled version of CAFE
2. Its faster because it uses a new API to talk to TM1 which is far less "chatty" over network than Perspectives
3. CAFE conforms users into views currently rather than allowing formula based execution. This is good and bad, less flexibility, but across a larger user base it will force people to work within boundaries that keep performance up.
4. CAFE can connect to both BI data sources and TM1, allowing you to build reporting in a mix and match fashion from any BI data source as well as TM1 directly. Not possible with Perspectives.
5. CAFE by default will retain data and changes must be committed back. This elminates the concept of calculation refresh using F9, Alt F9 etc. that users had to do with Perspectives. This also means users without CAFE or TM1 can see data in a file populated by CAFE. (However they can't refresh it)
6. CAFE allows multi paste. Not possible in Perspectives
7. Currently CAFE sheets cannot be used as Web Sheets.
8. Double click drill down is possible for both rows and columns with CAFE.

Ill try to think of more but this is my first set of thoughts when playing with CAFE.

[amin]

Hi,

On Point #6, that functionality has been available in In Spreadsheet Browser, including the drill down on rows and columns.

Other feature that, In Spreadsheet Browser also supports excel calculations in the Cube viewer.

I think the biggest win of Cafe over In Spreadsheet Browser is its Performance and Integration with BI data sources, otherwise most if not all the functionality of Cafe can be found in ISB.

R

[lotsaram]

Something else that is "paradigm changing" is that due to the refresh/commit model there is no need to set excel calculation to manual. For any long time Tm1 user or consultant this is part of life that we are used to and think is normal, but for any "normal" excel users this is an extreme inconvenience and not needing manual calculation is pretty important for widespread user acceptance.

[LanceTylor]

Hi All,

I am just doing an assessment of TM1 Perspectives/Web versus CAFE. Has anyone been able to get the drill thru/process to work? I have read through the forum, looked at the user guide, played around with CAFE and it seems the drill thru functionality isn't there yet? Maybe I am missing something here but I would suspect it will come in the future?

[lotsaram]

Yes drill-through is still missing.