What are the Pros and Cons of BOXI ?

general discussion
1

I have a few questions.

Wonder if anyone out there can answer for me?

  1. What can it do ?
  2. What are it’s limitations
  3. What is the strategy - security, reconciliations etc

Thanks so much!
DaMouse :mrgreen:

aposullivan :australia: (BOB member since 2004-07-23)

2

What do you want to do …?
a) Create Dash Boards…for Top Management.
b) Create Universes, Reports, Charts… for analysis… and taking business decisions.
c) It is now an integrated product, you can convert your CRYSTAL reports.
d) Load Data using Data Integrator (ETL)
e) Can be installed on different servers for scalability…
f) Users can access the information in various formats just by a browser.
g) Single Sign On feature… available
h) Supports .NET and JAVA for enhancements…
i) Supports a bunch of RDBMS’s, OLAP cubes…
j) Integrates with other top ERP’s (SAP, Baan etc) in the market with RDT’s.
And the list goes on…

a) Limitations are there for every product available in the market, there are some tools in BO that only works with Windows.

a) In security, it supports various protocols-- Active Directory, NT authentications, and LDAP is also supported.

You will find all the answers… if you do a search on
www.businessobjects.com

Hope this helps.

BO_Chief :us: (BOB member since 2004-06-06)

3

If you have to ask these questions, I strongly recommend you to ask BOBJ to do a POC for you. That is the best way for you to have a clear picture.

substring :us: (BOB member since 2004-01-16)

4

So I am not 100% sure of some of the BOXI tools limitations, specifically Crystal Reports.

I had already looked at the Business Objects website and all it talks about is what each of these tools can do. it doesn’t talk about the limitations of these tools (and ofcourse not, because they are trying to dazzle everyone).

So I wanted to know what the general BOXI user group community thought of each of the toolsets - performance management, crystal reports and webi in particular?

What have they found that is good about it?
What have they found that is frustrating about it?

For example, I would say that a limitation of Performance Management, is that you cannot migrate metrics from the PM Repository through the BOXI ‘Import Wizard’ from one environment to another e.g. Dev to Test.

I am not too familiar with Crystal Reports as I have come from a pure Business Objects background. And I guess I want to know things like, how does a Crystal report differ from Webi Intelligence report? What does Crystal offer that Web Intelligence doesn’t? When would you develop a Crystal report instead of a Webi report.

Can anyone point me to where I can find this information because I couldn’t find it specifically on the Business Objects website.

aposullivan :australia: (BOB member since 2004-07-23)

5

Tell us what you’re doing.

It’s unlikely that any of the volunteers on this board are going to spend the 3 hours you really need to discuss the pros and cons of BO vs other tools.

Try to be more specific with what you are asking us. Are you shopping or just trying to find out which tool to use for which task? Or, are you trying to figure out whether to upgrade?

Your question is simply to open-ended.

Steve Krandel :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

6

Yes it is open ended.
I am not expecting people to spend 3 hours writing a response either.

While I am working with the product over the next 10 months, i will come back to this posting and put my findings here myself.

(This post may need to be moved now to Crystal area)

In terms of what I am doing, i will have to design and build reports using Webi, Crystal and also build dashboards. (Webi and Dashboarding I am comfortable with)

The Crystal side of things is looking a wee bit messy.

We are building a new DW. Quite a lot of the reports are Operational Reports. These will be developed using Crystal. The big issue or point of contention is that some reports require data coming from different source systems.

Now I’ve currently being doing the BOXI R2 Crystal online learning courses (eLearning that BO provides). They talk about creating Data Foundations to link multiple source systems together.

Has anyone to-date done this? What is performance like? What are the issues with this?

Thanks again.

aposullivan :australia: (BOB member since 2004-07-23)

7

I have not used it…yet

But As far as performance is concerned, you need not worry… There are # of factors that affect the performance of a system as a whole, Network Bandwidth, Servers & Databases used, Volume of Data, No. of Users, Geography… etc etc… the front end tools like BO comes in the last…

If the base platform is good, then you will see remarkable performance…with the frond end tools.

  1. The Database which you have or you select… that is important ?
  2. The Data Model should be perfectly designed, partitioning of the tables, with proper indexes, primary keys, and they must be regularly checked, .

And We/I will wait and see what will be your response and findings after 10 months… :yesnod:

Hope it is CRYSTAL clear…!!

BO_Chief :us: (BOB member since 2004-06-06)