BI 2025 Debrief + Automating Migration Steps

[TomWoodhead]

Mark Richardson (Rich Analytics) and Chris Hickman (Blueline Insights) joined the APOS panel for a debrief session on the day after the long-anticipated release of SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025. The panel’s combined experience with SAP BusinessObjects was well over a half century, but I won’t date them with an exact figure.

The panel had a wide-ranging discussion on the updated platform, followed by a discussion of how migration to BI 2025 can be simplified through automation. You can view the session on demand here.

The updated timeline slide, courtesy of Eric Fenollosa and Gregory Botticchio in their BI Countdown presentation, inspired confidence in the panel that SAP BusinessObjects will be with us until at least the mid 2030s.

The SAP rationalization strategy for SAP BusinessObjects will allow them to focus on the platform’s core functionality. Mark Richardson noted that, unless you’re in a very small subset of organizations using BusinessObjects, your users will be affected by this strategy. Chris suggested that organizations with use cases involving some of the deprecated offerings may want to create a side-by-side, clean install of the platform on new hardware and move business units in sequence as their users adapt to BI 2025’s offerings. An in-place upgrade might create a great strain on the BI administrators and users.

Mark continued with comments on the new Product Availability Matrix (PAM). Upgrading your environment is a factor outside the scope of the BI 2025 platform that might influence your adoption timeline. The upgrade is an opportunity to “evergreen” your environment for future upgrades.

Mark continued with comments on Crystal Reports. He noted that the decade-long experiment with Crystal Reports Enterprise has come to an end. BI 2025 deprecates Enterprise and reverts users back to Crystal Reports Classic. Organizations will need to revert Enterprise content back to Classic. As there is no bulk tool for this process, it will mean manually opening, repointing and validating each report. In addition, Mark noted the coming availability of the RESTful SDK for Crystal Reports Classic. This SDK was initially developed for Enterprise, and its availability in Classic means the reports will be able to be detached from other APIs such as .NET or Java for greater flexibility. Mark also noted the availability of various demos and hands-on exercises specific to migrating Enterprise reports to Classic.

Chris Hickman said that the BI 2025 developments in Web Intelligence are “really exciting.” New report elements such as scrollable tables, interactive charts, and rich text in cells give Web Intelligence a more modern look and feel in its reports and dashboards, and greatly enhance its story-telling capabilities.

The fact that the rendering of these elements is delegated entirely to the browser means that the rendering is “quieter” and more seamless. The bigger implication of the delegation of rendering to the browser is that we can now build self-contained, offline, encapsulated and encrypted Web Intelligence document using the WIDX format which can be scheduled and published and remain interactive for the users.

Chris noted that the biggest issue facing many organizations that want to migrate to BI 2025 is the deprecation of UNV universes. Moving to UNX universes and repointing Web Intelligence reports is potentially the most time- and labor-intensive task BI teams will have to accomplish. Note too the database deprecations, which will affect the semantic layer in BI 2025. See the Product Availability Matrix (PAM) for more information.

APOS Senior Consultant Fred Walther then joined the conversation to talk about simplifying the BI 2025 migration process through automation.

Fred outlined the steps needed for an organized, efficient and effective approach to BI 2025 migration.

Fred then took a deeper dive into each step and the APOS solutions that can help organizations achieve them and manage the system’s technical debt.

As Chris noted earlier, UNX and Web Intelligence migration and validation are critical and labor-intensive steps in the BI 2025 migration process. Fred provided an overview of the APOS Web Intelligence Migrator solution, which greatly simplifies this process.