And what if you are not an SAP BW customer? It seems like they are doing exactly what they said they wouldn’t do . . . gear BO more to the SAP products only. Hmm . . . I remember a not so long ago thread on this.
All I can say is that for the past 3 weeks I’ve been working with BI4.0 and am not impressed. Sorry.[/b]
Mitra Moini (BOB member since 2002-09-01)
LOL, as I said if you are an existing SAP BW customer. And it is not suprising that SAP focused on better integration of the BusObjects suite with SAP’s flagship: SAP BW, is it? 
If you are on SAPBI4 make sure…as usual … that you are on very current patch level such as SP5 patch 4 ; -)
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
We’re not a SAP BW house and never will be - as Mitra said, this release appears to be all about the charting engine and SAP BW connectivity.
Indeed it isn’t they had a captive market there. Not to mention that previous BO versions were pretty appalling when working with BW 
.
Mak 1 
(BOB member since 2005-01-06)
So, if I understand correctly, going forward BO is going to be geared only towards SAP integration/products (although that is not what they said prior to purchasing BO). Well, then. Thanks for that information and I think it makes it clear that for everything non SAP we should start looking for another tool. I better start then . . .
Mitra Moini (BOB member since 2002-09-01)
Not quite that I don’t think. Having tried to work with XI3.1 against SAP BW and found it frustrating, I can see why they are throwing a lot of time and money into getting them working better. How embarrassing it would be for a reporting tool to perform no better against your own data warehousing system if you own said tool. Personally I think they’d be better looking at SAP RapidMarts to autobuild an EDW over SAP HANA rather than persisting with SAP BW.
I think you’re rushing into this and the number of packs and patches released already shows they’re responding to bugs/bad implementation of things.
Well, I am currently working on building reports in BOBJ against HANA. Again, not impressed, either with HANA or BI4.0.
Please understand, I don’t care if they are tailoring this version more towards integrating better with their own tools (which is still not there). But, I wished they would advertise it as such so that others that don’t use any SAP products don’t rush into upgrading their r3 environments. A little honesty goes a long way.
Mitra Moini (BOB member since 2002-09-01)
What’s wrong with HANA, I’ve talked to others who are very impressed by it.
It seems to me that people get impressed way too easily these days. Maybe our expectations have become so low that even miniscule things make us happy. It is kind of sad really.
Well, let me put it this way, they ran a stored procedure and a simple query yesterday afternoon in HANA which brought it down and has been quite sporadic so far today. Mind you, we are not looking at massive data yet as this is still in development here. That does not give me a fuzzy feeling for going live!!! Now they tell us that it MIGHT be a bug. Really? What a surprise.
Just saying . . .
Mitra Moini (BOB member since 2002-09-01)
Nope, that is not what I said. What I said is that it is naturally for any company to integrate their product suites with each other.
Is SAP directly involved in your SAP HANA project with e.g. consultants onsite?
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
I have heard very good things about HANA, also. This is from someone who has been in the business a long time and has been actively engaged with it for 9 months, or so.
However, on that particular project there is support from SAP themselves, in the form of their specialist services.
Mak 1 (BOB member since 2005-01-06)
On the HANA project I am involved with, SAP consultants are on site and working on it and have been from the beginning. Truly, I am not impressed by SAP consultants either.
You see, I have worked with multidimensional databases before and I have had the privilege to work with a wonderful tool against a multidimensional tool. Now, this was more than 5 years ago and that was impressive. I have also had the privilege of seeing a near real time data warehouse at work quite some time ago. Again, for the time, it was quite impressive. 5 years later (now) what SAP is offering doesn’t compare to what I’ve seen as possible over 5 years ago. The one big difference I guess is that now everything is in clouds!!! From my perspective, every cloud I’ve seen has dissipated at some point in some fashion
Mitra Moini (BOB member since 2002-09-01)
Always depends on who you get, how much money the client is spending e.t.c.
Mak 1 (BOB member since 2005-01-06)
I rolled off of an engagement early last year where my focus was primarily Business Objects Explorer, BI 4.0 primer for the clients staff, and HANA (High-performance Analytic Appliance; HANA, get it?) 1.0 on the back end. At this point, my observations may be a bit dated. That said, Ill break my observations down into 3 categories.
The Good:
HANA definitely delivers on its promise of high performance
.I mean
WOW
do things move once you get them into HANA. Even when you put a universe over it (universes put a little I/O back into the equation when you consider that data is written to core files and then loaded into a micro cube).
Case in point: I was doing ETL testing; nothing extraordinary, just making sure sources equal targets. Used the merged-dimensions capability of WebI to speed things up so built a quick and dirty universe over Oracle and another over HANA (yes, can be done in IDT, but I was under a deadline). The source was an Oracle 10g standard view and the target was HANA. After making sure the ETL guys did it right, I looked at the run times. Heres what I saw: Source: 6 minutes, Target: 1 minute. 6 times faster!
The Bad:
-Integration Gaps
HANA has its own metadata. You use its module called Modeler to build Analytic Views. You can build WebI dataproviders directly over Analytic Views instead of a universe; same goes for Explorer Information Spaces. Heres the problem with Explorer and HANA: To restrict an Explorer Information Space, you have to use an object qualified as a Pre-Defined Condition. Universes have em, Analytic Views dont. Explorer wont let you put a Dimension in the Filters section.
The only way I found to do it (after speaking the SAPs War Room in Germany), was to put a filter on a column in the Analytic View itself. Heres the problem: Id have to spawn out ump-teen versions of the same view with different filter values to meet the requirement. Nah, shouldnt be a maintenance problem .
-Version 1 Software
Well, as with any new software theres bound to be bugs. HANA is no exception. A lot of functions in the Modeler module dont work at all or dont return what you would expect. Also, very basic in terms of overall functionality; which, I suppose, makes sense if youre gunning for lightning speed.
The UGLY:
HANA was probably release to the market earlier than it should have been. When I rolled off this engagement earlier last year, SAP was on Revision 26
or was it 30? I lost count since we were averaging about 2 revisions a week. There were also some issues between Data Services (formerly known as BODI) and HANA; although I cant say exactly what.
What Ive suggested to clients is that either wait for version 2 or give Oracles Exadata (no, it’s not the same category as HANA exactly, but, being a Big Data solution, it still moves quick) a peek if you cant wait.
vonwolf 
(BOB member since 2002-10-21)
Very interesting 1st hand write up Vonwolf. Looks llike the 2nd release will be the one, then…
Mak 1 
(BOB member since 2005-01-06)
Well they didn’t advertise this, however, I went to ASUG several years back during the first release of BI4.0 and it was very apparent in the conference halls that that the release was clearly aimed at those infrastructures that had SAP products already in place. Go up to any friendly Crystal developer and ask them how they feel about BI 4.0. Talk about stranded on an island.
patmondor (BOB member since 2006-12-20)
just been re-reading this thread, and sadly I think I have to concur with the nay sayers.
I’ve been using BO4 for over a year now, and in my opinion it was released to market 18 months too early.
It’s buggy. Oh my God is it buggy, every SP fixes handfuls, which is great, but also seems to create a new crop. It is getting better, but far too slowly from too low a base.
WebI is STILL no susbtitue for DeskI. Yes, DeskI was going, but why take it away when the replacement is less functional, less intuitive, more limited and of couse, buggy. As I write this I have a WebI Rich Client session that is hung because I tried to change a piece of text in free hand SQL. For the 5th time. (no, there is nothing wrong with the SQL either, just changed a “AND (COL1 = ‘BLUE’)” to AND (COL1 = ‘RED’)" )
The strength of DeskI is that it allowed end users to quickly do Ad Hoc analysis, easily and powefully, without lots of training. It was quick, intuitive and gave them what they wanted - answers. I’m really not sure what WebI in any incarnation is trying to be, but it doesn’t tick those boxes.
Don’t even get me started on Xcelsius - it’s awful. It might have been great in 2003 but compared to it’s modern competitors? Nope. Users are used to drilling down and doing basic “why is this” drilldowns in Dashboards. A lot of effort to replicate in Xcelsius,just to do expected out of the box functionaility. And no multi select widget? horrifying. Yes, there are workarounds to the above, but why bother when a competitor tool just does it? It is getting slowly better, with direct (albeit very limited) Universe queries and the new html5 ability will be good when it’s complete though but not there yet.
What do I like? not much, but Information Design Tool (IDT) is great. This, when it works properly (still data federation doesnt work) will be fantastic, so much more powerful than universe designer.
Crystal. Hmm why would we use crystal? this is a BI tool, not a “build pretty looking canned reports” tool. Surely i’m not the only one to think that?
I could go on but you get the drift. I have long been a Bus Obs advocate, but where is it going? at the rate I see companies migrating away from the product to OBIEE or MSSQL i’m not sure there is much of a future outside of 100% SAP houses.
spoons (BOB member since 2012-06-26)
I agree, infact I think it always has been. So buggy it beggars belief, very hard to do the most simple things, I could go on.
I believe they would be best working on creating a decent dashboard tool, rather than carrying on trying to “fix” Xcelsius.
Mak 1 (BOB member since 2005-01-06)
I agree (too) that Xcelsius is awful, but I don’t agree that it should be tossed out. Thinking back to Application Foundation (later Performance Manager), which was also buggy and a nightmare to maintain (and sadly, for us, still is), but it had a great approach towards dashboarding. It could have been a fantastic product had SAP put more effort into it. I think Xcelsius fits that same mold – it’s a nightmare to work with, but has the potential to be much, much better.
joepeters 
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)
Better the devil you know then, eh Joe 
?
When I was contracting for Business Objects I was working with thier team who were trying to implement Performance Manager for the client. Even they were had difficulty getting it to work 
.
Mak 1 (BOB member since 2005-01-06)