CMC/CMS/SharePoint with seamless AD integration? You’re such a tease.
The constructs of Crystal and SSRS are reasonably similar - I could imagine them writing a conversion tool.
With UDT/IDT they’d have an ideal base to launch all sorts of things, especially teaming it up with Power BI, which could integrate through to Webi (consider the state of BO’s dashboarding/visualisation in 2007).
Getting rid of Java is no bad thing, no matter how good you are with it Joe
My main fear with IDT is that it will be seen as a tool that can be used instead of a data warehouse, leading to endless performance issues.
You’re not alone. I didn’t like IDT in 4.0, due to too many missing features. But in my blog post of IDT 4.1, I stated that I like the tool. It’s not perfect. But then, what software is?
Lumira BI Platform can’t refresh against UNV
Design Studio doesn’t support UNV
I’m pretty sure the new merged Analysis Office/Live Office product won’t support UNV
I’m not sure who SAP consulted about the IDE for IDT, but it certainly made some weird choices.
I don’t personally need the new functionality in IDT/UNX but I do want to leverage the new products. What’s holding us back is the thousands of documents out there that are pointing at UNVs, and the fact that SAP have not provided anyway to migrate them to an equivalent UNX.
Yes, and good on them for writing something… but it is an Admin tool, users don’t get to migrate their own documents and the licensing model doesn’t suit a large environment where you want to stage a migration… and really why should SAP Customers have to pay a third party to get that service anyway ?
SAP is a mutil-billion dollar company. Providing a clear migration path should have been part of any product plan, let alone the core of the BO product - the semantic layer.
I agree. I did write my own utility to do this, but it is not perfect and I wouldn’t expect everyone to do the same. I was very surprised to find that there was no automated conversion tool included with the product.
Way back when I selected BO as the OLAP or close to OLAP tool of choice at one of my sites adding it is surpassing all the other reporting tools out there.
Years later…
I would recant my recommendation adding that although it is a GREAT tool NOW it will go through upgrades and changes which would make it almost useless to do any complex reporting in the future.
And I don’t want to even go into how stability has or is now CRAP!
Yes, you could say I am frustrated with this tool and the upgrades has made i as bad as cumbersome as trying to do things in Crystal… GARBAGE!
Most part is the stability. I have used DESKI and the earlier version of WEBI. DESKI was and is still rock solid with everything it can do.
Webi’s earlier version were limited BUT the stability was FAR better than it is in this latest 4.x version.
I hang countless number of times, I cannot move as fast as I did within earlier version; … but cannot think if anything else at the moment as I am trying get just simple report dumps. The IDT… too many things to go on about how miserable they failed providing something we thought to be pretty slick. More of a pain to work in than anything else. So far any universe(multi or otherwise) I need I simply have multiple universes in UDT; works much much better and cleaner. IDT is hanging and moving slowly miserably with any type of thing you need to do; the more you add to it the worse off you are
I find 4.1 Rich Client to be stable but agree that Webi itself can be flaky at times.
I’ve not used IDT in anger yet so cannot comment on how it should perform. I’ve always been concerned about the overall federation abilities of this and indeed any tool. I’ve worked with another data federation tool and it’s a lazy way of trying to build a reporting database.
If SAP’s vision is to have SAP BO as a BW/HANA tool only in the future, then split EDGE off to a separate unit and let it develop separately, as it probably needs to. At the moment it’s failing to be all things to everyone.
It’s not a horrible tool. I like some of the features. However, given the choice, I still prefer to work in UDT. It’s much more stable, and handles contexts much, much better than IDT.
I really do hate the idea of taking jobs to replace BO with (BLACH)MSTR or COGNOS.
Maybe I should have foreseen what SAP will do to demolish BO… this IDT is just sickening to use
IDK, but I really miss the best company and tool(Business Objects) I recommended to just about 50 sites… right now I am just about it not knowing the direction would go south instead of forward… very
It sounds like Business Objects was at the top of the list in the OLAP area.
I wish I got into it back then… now I am uncomfortable as this tool as gone from ‘okay’ in 2011 to ridiculous and cumbersome(very slow, memory hog, hanging,) now.
It more closely resembles how Crystal report builds and that ONLY technical personnel can use it… not what this company was looking for and so went back to using lots and lots of EXCEL reports using Macros.
Again, I read and heard so much of the earlier versions… wish I had the opportunity.
Anyway, looking for macros on this site to help with XLS; hope I find something :?
Cognos, imho, was always better at OLAP reporting than BO, given my experience of using both. Cognos had its own dedicated OLAP tools/engine for cube building. BO excelled/excels at reporting and adhoc analysis; OLAP analysis within Cognos, SSAS, etc. is great but you are confined to the items within the cube if you want to do anything quickly.
Webi itself IS a non-technical tool by and large; that is, 80% of it doesn’t require any real technical knowledge beyond a basic course as with Excel. The devil is in the complexity of the remaining 20% (which probably account for 50% of development time).
The key to success, assuming that the underlying data platform is sound, is the semantic layer; in our case, the universe. If this is built well and adds value to the underlying data model rather than simply replicating it, then the reporting is a lot simpler.
I am starting to see that more companies are going away from SAP and jumping on to tools like LOOKER
Seems that no one is getting support or fond of the SAP Help Desk arena; that is the big thing I am seeing. Wonder if anyone is seeing the same!?
Shame because SAPBO is still great in my book but with the lack of support and the expense tools like LOOKER is making its way up. But from what I see LOOKER does not offer anything that BO doesn’t. So I am thinking its the expense and the support. High and support not there
I see it also coming - leting SAC Cloud Promotion go nuts -the traditional good old Webi will stay behind - from Marketing view - and all others will try to get a hold on BI market share - because of lack of some Basic Marketing skills and keeping the development in mind. But I also see very engaged WEBI-responsible persons doing there Job despite SAP Cloud FIRST trump-ets… Mr. Botticchio … and others…
Add to that the learning curve for both developers and general users if you’ve got BO thoroughly embedded in your business. You don’t see many companies move between Cognos and BO because of the investment in changing between them and their inherent similarity. It’s usually a decision made when the company moves from Access and Excel on to a proper reporting platform and then stuck with regardless.
LOOKER and SAP BI are very very different use cases. Ones Cloud for a start, so if you have a customer comparing side by side, I would hazard a guess that they dont fully know what theyre doing. Looker doesnt do enterprise reporting for a start and building a metalayer in it requires coding LookML, SAP BI has the amazing Universe designer or IDT.
There are a lot of Cloud BI solutions out there now but not one does enterprise reporting, which, going on all the customers I speak to, is still very important.
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)
about it not knowing the direction would go south instead of forward… very 
(BOB member since 2002-08-30)
(BOB member since 2006-02-08)