We are currently on SAP BO 4.2 SP6 which is out of support. The powers that be decided we would not upgrade to a supported version because we are going to phase out Business Objects and go with Power BI and the reporting tools of a new ERP system which is 1-2 years from implementation. Our security team believes our current 4.2 version has vulnerabilities and should be upgraded. They mentioned log4j and scripting vulnerabilities. I told them log4j does not impact our version and we don’t use SAP products that have scripting capabilities. And we don’t have an external facing interface to the web it’s internal to our network. Our app director wants to upgrade regardless. I have a couple questions for those with experience with 4.2 and 4.3.
- Is there much of a learning curve to adapt to the Fiori interface? i.e. navigating and scheduling? Is it intuitive enough where our users could adapt to it with minimal training?
- We have a few in house applications which are used to schedule reports. They are written in C sharp and use the SDK. One uses the RESTFUL web services. Our 3 party vendor says we should just be able to repoint our apps to the new libraries or references. Does anyone have experience with upgrading SDK apps from 4.2 to 4.3. Is it just a matter of repointing references or are there coding changes required?
If anyone could give me an idea of what I’m in for I would very much appreciate it.
SAP have highlighted a few vulnerabilities, might be worth checking this link if you have access:
There is an archive available for previously released vulnerabilities.
The Fiori interface is familiar but different, same workflow for using the system but you might need to have a look to find a particiluar item.
Restful services were pretty much the same between 4.2 and 4.3. From memory the endpoint and login procedures were the only differences, although the login procedure may have been a mistake on our side.
Thanks for the info Scot.!
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The Fiori interface is quite different, and you will definitely need some time to learn the differences. BI4.2 does include Fiori as an option, so you can ease your users into it. Just access /BOE/BILaunchpad instead of /BOE/BI. There are additional changes in BI4.3, so it isn’t exactly the same, but it’ll get you acclimated.
If you’re using the .NET SDK (and not just the REST API), then you will need to upgrade the client. There were encryption changes in BI4.3 SP02, so any clients older than that will not connect to a SP02+ server. Java SDK clients require additional changes, but if you’re not using Java, then you don’t need to worry about it.
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We are stable on 4.3 support pack 3 service pack 0. We are showing a critical security vulnerability: Apache Struts 2.0.0 <=> 2.3.37(EOL) / 2.5.0 <=> 2.5.33 / 6.0.0 <=> 6.3.0.2 Remote Code Execution (S2-067)
Our plan is to upgrade to SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025.
Thanks for the info Roger!
As mentioned by others, 4.3 FIORI interface is much different from the 4.2 interface. We handled this by doing one-hour webinars with our users to orient them to the new interface, how to find documents, differences in prompts, scheduling, etc. This was strictly for document viewers. Learning the document creation interface is more work.
We also have Java applications using the BusinessObjects Java SDK libraries. It’s been at least a couple of years since we upgraded from 4.2 to 4.3 but I do not recall any major issues or major code changes to our applications. You definitely need to recompile your Java applications with the Java JAR files for 4.3. Every time we install a patch, we recompile our Java applications with the new JAR files to make sure they work the same.
Thanks for the info mgrackin!
There is a learning curve going from BI 4.2 to BI 4.3, so we put together a short delta class that showed short examples of the same activity in BI 4.2 vs. 4.3. My personal opinion is that BI 4.3 is much easier for a new user to learn, but unfortunately existing users have to, as Yoda said, unlearn what they have learned. If you wonder why the left-hand panel moved from the left side to the right side, the answer is in BI 2025, which looks very much like BI 4.3 but with the addition of a Quick Access panel on the left. Users do not have to use the Quick Access panel, as all of the 4.3 UI is still in BI 2025. But as its name implies, the Quick Access panel allows users to create and modify Webi documents much faster than in previous versions. Administrators will have no trouble moving from BI 4.2 to BI 4.3 and BI 2025 (which technically is BI 4.4), as the Central Management Console is largely unchanged.
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