We are upgrading from 4.1 SP5 to 4.1 SP7 and need to be able to promote through out landscape though out this process. This means that we will have a period of time where we are promoting backwards through SP’s.
Has anyone done this before and if so did you encounter any problems?
SAP obviously do not recommend this, which we are aware of.
brockbank (BOB member since 2016-12-20)
My experience is like Joe’s. Universes have no problem with promoting to a lower SP, but reports do. You can get many errors when doing this. So, I would suggest that during your upgrade time, all report development be done in the production environment. Universe development can still be done in the Dev environment, and promoted through QA to Prod.
MichaelWelter 
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
Hi all, what about 4.2 and 4.3?
Are the reports and the universes fully backward compatible?
Thank you in advance,
Ale
I don’t know about how it may actually work but using Promotion Management to migrate content to a lower environment is not supported by SAP Business Objects.
We haven’t done this in our environments. We put a development moratorium in place while we upgrade. We usually complete upgrades within a one week timeframe so it hasn’t been much of an issue for us.
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)