Solution Spotlight - APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 is very flexible in how it lets you adopt the new semantic layer and UNX universe, but it is in your organization's best interest to adopt the UNX universe sooner rather than later. Essentially, you have three options:

• Stay fully on UNVThis option does not require any immediate action, but simply maintaining your UNV universes means you will slowly fall behind the technology curve as the SAP BI convergence strategy continues its inexorable course.
• Move fully to UNXThis option allows you to take full advantage of new SAP BI capabilities, but it requires great efforts to update skill sets, convert universes, and repoint reports.
• Retain some UNV, while performing all new development in UNXThis option allows you to transition at your own speed to UNX, taking advantage of new capabilities where they provide the most value, while preserving UNV universes that perform well. In the short term, you will have more maintenance, testing, and documentation as downsides to this approach, but it provides the most flexibility for a considered migration effort.

When you are ready to adopt the UNX universe, APOS has a solution to help you achieve your objectives as painlessly as possible.

APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence

The migration to UNX universes is a daunting project for many organizations. While the conversion of individual universes may be manageable, the repointing of all the associated Web Intelligence reports is a vastly bigger initiative. The APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence allows you to address the size and scope of such initiatives, providing strong process execution, effective and safe management of BI assets, and efficient methods for containing IT resource costs.

A fully supported solution, APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence delivers:

• Bulk conversion of universes from UNV to UNX format
• Bulk repointing of Web Intelligence reports to new UNX universe
• Automated, high volume testing of reports to validate accuracy
• Tightly controlled, project-based methodology

Learn more about the APOS WebI Migrator

Solution Spotlight - APOS Validation Manager

The increasing pace of technological change, the growing volume of data, and its complexity, make automated report testing an ongoing subject of interest for BI platform managers and administrators.

From full-version migration to in-place upgrade to day-to-day report development and management, report testing can be a labor- and resource-intensive activity. The APOS Validation Manager solution presents a project-based, highly controlled environment for testing reports. It works with:

• SAP Web Intelligence
• Analysis for Office
• Crystal Reports
• Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Use Validation Manager log in to your source BI system, search for report objects, add the report objects to a project, set the target BI system connection information, and import the files into your project for testing.

Simplify the import operation by using other APOS solutions such as APOS Insight or the InfoScheduler or Instance Manager modules of the APOS Administrator solution, or you can import by specifying schedules or from existing instances.

Validation Manager tells you when report validation is failed, successful, or successful with warnings, simplifying your testing process and allowing you to increase the speed of report implementation.

Validation Manager provides numerous benefits:

• Rapid technology adoption ensuring timely and accurate information for decision-making workflows
• Increase the scope of your migration testing sample, and the depth of testing
• Improved internal control governance for SOX compliance and other regulatory requirements
• Implement database / schema changes and upgrades, semantic layer changes, and vendor-based data source changes more quickly and dependably
• Efficient resource management

Learn more about APOS Validation Manager…

SAP Convergence Strategy - Web Intelligence

The April 20, 2017, SAPinsider Q&A focused on the SAP BI Convergence Strategy.

So far, I've published posts on the convergence strategy itself, and on what's new in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 SP4, and the merger of Lumira and Design Studio. Let's turn our attention to SAP Web Intelligence.

During this year's Q&A, Gregory Botticchio told us that the Web Intelligence team had delivered approximately "50 innovations and cumulative enhancements." The top 6 most popular, according to Gregory:

• Parallel refresh of WebI data providers, for all datasources
• Commentary: add a comment in a report and in a table cell
• Shared Element: share and reuse blocks (table, carts) between users
• New SAP HANA access mode (direct access and OnLine)
• dHTML catchup vs the Java applet
• Dynamic, or Cascading, Input Controls

Coming in SP4 are improvements to the Web Intelligence dHTML client, new chart types and cumulative enhancements, but the biggest news in SP4 is a new Web Intelligence interface:

…we will mainly deliver a new, modern and elegant, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence experience. It will be an interface build in HTML5, using some SAP Fiori UI5 elements. And it will be mostly an interactive viewer that you will have the choice to use in parallel of the existing one.

Gregory also gave us some details on the road ahead for Web Intelligence:

In the mid/long-term: We are planning a new simplified and modernized WebI Designer, to complete the story. Also we are thinking of changing the way to create reports by proposing Suggestions and Recommendations. Interactive Analysis for the end-users will also be key in this future release.

You can find more about the Web Intelligence roadmap in the Q&A transcript, which you can access from the APOS On-Demand Webinars page:

View the complete SAPinsider Q&A Transcript

Future posts will look at what's new in Analysis for Office and SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.

SAP Web Intelligence Update Webinar Summary

Groundhog Day 2017 was not particularly informative concerning the length of our Winter here in Canada. A recent study determined that the rodents have been right only 37% of the time over the past several decades, which isn't even randomly inaccurate.

However, Groundhog Day did bring us a wealth of information from Gregory Botticchio in the form of a webinar that highlighted advances in SAP Web Intelligence and the road ahead.

Gregory told us about WebI themes if BI 4.2:

• Building a Trusted Foundation - removing upgrade barriers with Linked Universes, and client improvements with Parallel Queries
• Enabling the Business - collaboration through Commentary and Shared Elements, client improvements through GeoMaps and Big Numbers, and unleashing the ecosystem through Visualization Extensions
• Leveraging the SAP Backend - SAP BW improvements with BEx-Authored Universes, and SAP HANA Enhancements with HANA Direct Access and HANA Online

These features were delivered in SP2, and enhanced in SP3 with:

• dHTML Catchup - striving to achieve parity with the Web Intelligence Java Applet (an ongoing project)
• Dynamic Input Controls - more than just cascading controls
• Sets - authoring sets in the Infromation Design Tool, using them to query data, and consuming them through universes
• Referenced Cells - using variables that return the value of a specified cell, maintaining the context of that cell, and listing referenced cells as Available Objects
• Commentary - improved usability and lifecycle; performance optimization
• Parallel Data Provider - parallel query support on BEx queries

When SP4 arrives later this year, it will launch a whole new set of Web Intelligence features that will improve Web Intelligence functionality and render the user experience more consistent with other SAP BusinessObjects solutions. 

SP 4 is scheduled to include:

• A New Viewer
• More dHTML Catchup
• New Chart Technology
• An SDK & Extensions

Click the link below to view the webinar on demand and listen to Gregory Botticchio, BI Product Manager, SAP, give us the lowdown on what's up next for SAP Web Intelligence

View this Webinar On Demand...

Update: SAP Web Intelligence

Happy Groundhog Day!

Has it really been a year since APOS last hosted an SAP Web Intelligence Update webinar?

Yes it has.

Between then and now, SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 SP3 was released, bringing many of the features promised in that webinar to life, including:

• Java/DHTML Clients Parity
• Cascading Input Control
• Shared Elements
• Comments
• Parallel Queries

When SP4 arrives later this year, it will launch a whole new set of Web Intelligence features that will improve Web Intelligence functionality and render the user experience more consistent with other SAP BusinessObjects solutions.

History, as Mark Twain famously said, does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and we will soon have SAP's Gregory Botticchio, BI Product Manager, SAP, rhyming off what's new with WebI, as APOS hosts a new SAP Web Intelligence Update webinar. Sign up and listen to Gregory on Thursday, February 2 (Groundhog Day in the US and Canada), as he gives us the lowdown on what's up next for SAP Web Intelligence.

Register for this webinar...

Will Your Web Intelligence Journey Lead You into Lumira?

When: April 22, 2015 - 11:30 am EDT

APOS is pleased to present this online Q & A session in conjunction with SAP and SAPinsider. During this session, SAP Product experts will explore the latest capabilities, future roadmap, and product synergies of SAP Web Intelligence and SAP Lumira. The SAP expert panel will include:

• Ty Miller - Vice President, Lumira Product Management, SAP
• Frank Prabel - Senior Director of Product Management, SAP
• Gregory Botticchio - BI Product Manager, SAP
• Sylvain Riboud - SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Semantic Layer Area Delivery Manager, SAP
• Ian Booth - Director Product Management, SAP

Understanding product roadmaps and capabilities is key to successful SAP BI tool selection and usage. What criteria will differentiate the application and uses of SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP Lumira, now and in the future?

This online interactive Q & A session will give you the opportunity to pose your questions directly to these SAP experts, learn about recent and upcoming Web Intelligence and Lumira enhancements, and explore opportunities to harmonize the use of these tools for better user engagement.

Register for this session.

Need BI 4.0 WebIs from .NET Apps?

If you're investigating migration to BI 4.0, you probably already know that BI 4.0 doesn't include a plug-in to let you schedule Web Intelligence reports from .NET applications. If that's all that was keeping you from migrating, then we have good news: the APOS WebI .NET plug-in lets you schedule WebIs and manage defaults from .NET applications.
We created this plug-in to allow our own well managed BI solutions to work with BI 4.0, and now we're offering to the SAP BusinessObjects developer community. The APOS WebI .NET plug-in lets the developer handle format, prompt information, and other flags while scheduling Web Intelligence reports from .NET apps or saving report defaults.

Another issue that our plug-in solves is prompt reconstruction. When you create a new Web Intelligence report, or update an existing one, the prompt information on the report object becomes unavailable to the developer through the SDK. The APOS WebI .NET plug-in uses prompt reconstruction functionality to let the developer access the prompt information. You can schedule the report with the reconstructed prompts or save the report object for later use. You do not have to update the source report in order to schedule an instance.

You will notice that we are not using the GetPluginInterface method to initialize our plug-in. On a Web Intelligence object that method simply fails regardless of what you try to do with the returned object. We actually support using the plug-in interface to initialize our plug-in but this will not work with a Web Intelligence object. We tested it with other InfoObjects with no issues.

Example:

Using sm As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.SessionMgr = New CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.SessionMgr

    Using es As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.EnterpriseSession = sm.Logon("My Account", "My Password", "My CMS", "secEnterprise")

        Using iStore As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.InfoStore = es.GetService("InfoStore")

            Using objs As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.InfoObjects = iStore.Query("SELECT TOP 1 * FROM CI_INFOOBJECTS WHERE SI_NAME = 'My Report'")

                Using obj As CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.InfoObject = objs(1)

                    Using plg As APOSWebiPlugIn.webi = New APOSWebiPlugIn.webi(obj)

                        plg.WebiAPOSLicenseKey = "<your key here>"

                        'Choose to schedule to XLS format

                        plg.WebiFormat = APOSWebiPlugIn.CeWebiFormat.ceWebiFormatExcel

                        'Get the list of prompt names

                        Dim prompts As List(Of String) = plg.WebiGetPromptList()

                        'GEt the lsit of values for the first prompt

                        Dim vals As List(Of APOSWebiPlugIn.WebiPromptValue) = plg.WebiGetPromptValues(prompts(0))

                        'Clear the list of values

                        vals.Clear()

                        'Add Texas as the only value for the prompt

                        vals.Add(New APOSWebiPlugIn.WebiPromptValue("Texas"))

                        'Save the list of values back to the report

                        plg.WebiSetPromptValues(prompts(0), vals)

                        'Schedule the report

                        iStore.Schedule(objs)

                    End Using

                End Using

            End Using

        End Using

    es.Logoff()

    End Using

End Using

You are welcome to try it and let me know what you think. Just email webiplugin@apos.com to ask for the library or send in any comments.