Moving from Classic to Optimized Stories in SAP Analytics Cloud: what to look out for

As part of the Q2 SAC release earlier this year, SAP announced that the Optimized Experience, which essentially pulls Stories, Analytic Applications and Digital Boardrooms together into a single object, is going to be the standard for SAC development going forward. While I believe that this change in itself is a good thing, it provides users with a more streamlined and versatile Story interface, it also brings some challenges that will need to be tackled.

Since the Classic and Optimized interfaces are designed differently from the ground up, there will be a feature loss as part of the transition. Yes, the Optimized Experience (OE) brings a lot of cool new things to the table (e.g. Lite Viewer), but at this point in time, it is crucial to identify where the gaps are so that developers can anticipate and mitigate these. There are a lot of SAC customers that still have a substantial number of Classic Stories in productive environments, so this is an action that cannot be performed soon enough. Right off the bat: what is going to go away?

• Grid pages.
• Smart Discovery.
• Points of Interest.
• Search to Insight (which will be replaced with Just Ask, only on Cloud Foundry environments for the time being).
• Allocations (which will be replaced with Allocation Step Data Actions (in Planning).
• Finally, the separate Analytic Application and Digital Boardroom objects.

Additionally, SAP has published an extensive list of the features and APIs that will no longer (or partially) be supported, as well as the impact they might have (you can find this here). Based on my experience with some of our customers however, there are quite a few functionalities here that are definitely used and for which users will have to find an alternative (solution). I have proposed a list of (some of) these features as well as possible alternatives/workarounds below:

Of course, both this shortlist and SAP’s more exhaustive page of impacted features does not take away from the fact that you should do a thorough delta check of your Story before publishing it to the end-user(s). Personally, I would create a copy of the Classic Story and start converting that copy to the new OE. You can do this by using the ‘Convert to Optimized Design Experience’ option in the ‘File’ - ‘Save’-menu in the toolbar while editing a Story (see example below).

After conversion, pay attention to small aspects of your Story that might behave (a bit) differently. I have seen inconsistent behavior around objects such as filters, dynamic texts, conditional formatting or calculated dimensions and dimension input controls. Verify that your Story components are still responding in the way you would expect; slow and steady wins the race here.

Now that you know what and how to look out for, let us look at the when. SAP’s current timeline states the following:

• New customers (new SAC tenants) will not have access to non-supported objects (in accordance with the lists I mentioned above) starting in Q4 2024. This also means that non-supported objects cannot be imported, through the Content Network or otherwise, to these new tenants.

• In the first months of 2025, existing customers will not be able to create (or copy) non-supported objects. Existing non-supported objects can still be edited or shared, but this marks the first real limitation that active Classic object-users will encounter.

• Late 2025 will see the permanent phase-out of non-supported objects. This means that they are no longer accessible in any way. To put it more practical: this is the hard deadline for the migration of all Classic objects to the OE Story. Since this is not an actual date (yet), my advice would be to finish your landscape migration to the OE Story well ahead of this time period.
  
  Now you know what needs to be done, and when, to get your SAC landscape to a future-proof state. If you need support in making the step from the Classic to the Optimized Experience, do not hesitate to contact us!