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Former Member
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     As we at SAP continue to affirm our commitment to best-in-class analytics solutions, we recognize the need to embrace multiple systems, platforms, and experiences, with the equally important need to simplify the solutions that enable us to do so. With this in mind, we have received valuable feedback for improvement from our customers, partners, and the BI community in general regarding SAP Lumira Server for HANA (LS4H) and SAP Lumira Cloud. Based on this feedback, we have updated Lumira’s on-premise server architecture to support several key objectives that include support for relational and multi-dimensional data, business analyst and authored dashboard workflows support, and enterprise deployments of Trusted Data Discovery, while at the same time continuing to use SAP HANA as an in-memory data platform.

     For cloud, we are embarking on a new cloud native analytics solution called SAP Cloud for Analytics that will combine the capabilities of data discovery, planning and predictive within a single cloud platform and will allow for embedded workflows within other applications. Some of these new capabilities can already be experienced in SAP Cloud for Planning. More capabilities are planned and will be revealed at SAP TechEd Las Vegas as well as online.

     The next step that SAP has taken along this path of flexibility and simplification for Lumira is the introduction of SAP Lumira Server for BI Platform (LS4BIP). With Lumira now coexisting with enterprise BI content on the BI Platform, business users are able to open, interact with, edit, refresh and save Lumira documents through their browser in the BI Launchpad. End users no longer need to access different servers for agile visualization (Lumira) and enterprise BI (Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports and Design Studio). This integration enables Trusted Data Discovery, allowing IT to govern Lumira with an enterprise BI platform, reducing administrative overhead associated with managing multiple environments and allowing content and user security to all be maintained through the CMC.

     Customers with HANA can continue to leverage HANA’s integration with LS4BIP to obtain high-speed analytical results off of large enterprise data. The integration of Lumira into the BI platform effectively creates a single, trusted infrastructure within which business users and IT can share a common experience for enterprise BI & Trusted Data Discovery.

     With Lumira integrated in the BI Platform, we can now add refreshable data support for Universes, BEx queries and Big Data sources to the already familiar online HANA data. Business users and analysts can acquire and prepare data through their Lumira Desktop and save it to LS4BIP from their browser. Data acquisition and preparation via the browser is planned for future releases, and if you have enabled auditing in your BI environment, Lumira can now take advantage of this.


     With the 1.28 release of Lumira, we have discontinued future updates to LS4H and Lumira Cloud. Your existing Lumira Desktop 1.28 will continue to work with both LS4H and Lumira Cloud until their end of maintenance which is planned for September 30, 2016. For existing Lumira Cloud users that would like to showcase their latest Lumira version content in the cloud, we have made a hosted instance of LS4BIP available. If you wish to trial LS4BIP through this hosted instance, please contact your account executive for more information on how to get an account created.


     For current LS4H deployments, the switch is simple: any content designed with Lumira Desktop and published to LS4H can be republished to LS4BIP.


     For LS4H customers, the following section outlines some of the steps that are required to migrate from LS4H to LS4BIP:

1.    Prepare your BI Platform:

a.   If installed, uninstall LIMA (the old Lumira In-Memory Add-on that is now wholly replaced by LS4BIP). Check out this blog
for additional information regarding the differences between LS4BIP and LIMA.


b.   Educate & Enable Users: Inform your business users about the change in server names, authentication methods, and publishing and saving workflows to LS4BIP. There is no need to do additional training regarding the Lumira Desktop tool as the changes are made to the workflow configurations and not the tool itself.

2.    Migration:

a.   Lumira Content Migration: There are two ways of creating Lumira stories within LS4H: one using Lumira Desktop and the other through the “Lumira Launchpad”. Content created using Lumira Launchpad of LS4H cannot be saved or republished to the BI Launchpad of LS4BIP and must be recreated from within either LS4BIP or Lumira Desktop. In contrast, if a story was created using Lumira Desktop, the content can be re-saved to LS4BIP. This process must be completed for all documents. Additionally, you must ensure that users have the rights to save Lumira documents to LS4BIP (either to the public folder or to their favourites, depending on the business needs).


b.   Report Security & Authorization: Within the BI Platform, you may need to add users to the groups and provide application level access in order to let your users view/edit Lumira documents. Create a sample user and test your security setup before rolling out the change in large scale. There is no need to create new roles on HANA, and you can use your existing data security model (analytic priveleges) to secure your report data. With Lumira 1.28 you can setup SSO using SAML between the BI Platform and HANA. If you are new to the SAP BI Platform, check the BI Platform security guide for more details.


c.   Data security can be managed either at the data source level or in Universes.  Where HANA is the data source, you can use the data security that you have configured there.

3.    Post Migration:

a.   Remove access to the old server: Once all the content has been migrated to LS4BIP, ensure that access to LS4H is disabled (or the server is decommissioned) as users should not be able to publish documents to the old server.


b.   Keep a watch on the BI Platform: Plan on revisiting your sizing periodically so that your server doesn’t become overburdened by users creating new content and growing the total volume of documents. If unchecked, this can lead to degradation in performance and can affect the overall user experience. In short, ensure that the platform is monitored regularly and actions are taken proactively rather than reactively.


c.   Ensure proper workflow: If you prefer not to deploy Lumira Desktop to a large user base, your IT team can create a standardized Lumira document and save it to BI Platform for users to edit and create new stories using their browser. Note that data preparation capabilities are not yet available for LS4BIP. Data acquisition and preparation via the browser is planned for future releases.

     While you may continue to use LS4H, as of Lumira 1.23 there are new features in Lumira Desktop and LS4BIP that have not been added and will not be supported with LS4H and Lumira Cloud. For example, BW mashups from BEx queries, scheduling, expressions, data blending, forecasting, LCM, auditing, monitoring, (the full list can be found at the bottom of this page) are only available with LS4BIP. Content created in Lumira Desktop 1.28 and below using these features, and any content created in Lumira Desktop 1.29 and above, will not be supported with LS4H or Lumira Cloud. If you wish to trial these features before upgrading to a new version of Lumira Desktop, you may deploy two editions of Lumira Desktop on one workstation by following the steps outlined in this blog post.

     We have listened very closely to your feedback on how we can improve your experience with Lumira for Trusted Data Discovery and we are confident that you will find LS4BIP meets the majority of those improvement requests. Business users will now be able to unleash their creative DataGenius and create visualizations and stories directly on LS4BIP. We have many more ways that we are looking to continue to improve your experience with Lumira and we encourage you to continue to submit your ideas on how we can further do so in our Idea Place category for SAP Lumira.


Feature comparison of Lumira Server for BI Platform and Lumira Server for HANA

O = supported     X = unsupported

LS4BIP

LS4H

Agility

Prepare Room

*

X

Visualization Room

O

O

Blending: offline sources

O

X

Blending: HANA online

O

X

Blending: intersect/except#

O

X

Forecasting/Linear Regression

O

X

Export Records from viz or data point selection#

O

X

Enhancements to Expressions: #

O

X

o   Reset Running Totals #

O

X

o   Difference From #

O

X

o   Reset Percent Of #

O

X

o   Reset Moving Average #

O

X

Calendar week support in time hierarchies#

O

X

Create, edit and delete 'global' filters

O

X

Copy visualization to clipboard #

O

X

Set Display Formatting for measures and dimensions

O

X

Compose Room

O

O

Data Source

FHSQL

O 1

X

CSV, XLS and TXT

O

O

Universe

O 2

X

HANA Online

O 3

O

HANA Acquisition

O 4

X

HANA Multi-database Container

*

X

BW Acquisition (BEx queries)

O 5

X

Platform

Refresh On Open

*

O

Scheduling

O 6

X

Publication

*

X

Share

O

O

Desktop Governance

O

X

Auditing

O

X

Data Quality and Lineage

*

X

Commentary

O 7

X

Life Cycle Management

O 8

X

SSO: Windows AD

O

X

SSO: HANA SAML

O

O

SSO: SAP BW STS

O 9

X

Categorization

O

O (FIORI)

URL Sharing / Embedding / Bookmark

*

O (FIORI)

Mobile

Mobile BI

*

O (Online)

Notification

*

X

SDK

Open Document

*

X

Visualization Extensions

*

O

Data Access Extensions

O 10

X

* Planned innovation where feature is planned for future release. Subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any for any reason without notice.


# Feature also available in Compose Room

1.      Supported sources for server side refresh as of 1.28 include SQL 2008/12/14, Oracle 11g and Generic JDBC. More are planned

2.      Server side refresh for .unx only

3.      Supported with SAP HANA Revision 82, 83, 84, 85, 96, 97

4.      Supported with SAP HANA Revision 82

5.      Supported with SAP BW 7.x

6.      Documents based on .unx Query Panel, XLS/CSV/TXT and SAP BW only as of 1.28. More are planned

7.      Discussion thread capability inherited from the BI Platform. Annotations are a planned innovation

8.      Requires BI 4.1 SP06+

9.      Supported only for Documents created based on Managed connections (OLAP Connections in CMC)

10.    Universe Query Panel Data Access Extension for .unx and Download from SAP Business Warehouse for SAP BW only. More are planned

32 Comments
Donatas
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi, Nicolas,

 

Thank you for the post and information about these important changes.

 

I have several questions:

1. You've mentioned that instead of SAP Lumira Cloud there will be another cloud solution packed with analytics, planning and predictive capabilities. When this new solution be announced and will it have a free starting account which could be used to publish our analytics content to the public internet?

2. You didn't mention SAP Lumira Server for Teams in your post. What about this solution - will it a go forward solution or will it be discontinued as well? From the UI and workflow perspective it's very similar to SAP Lumira Server for HANA and SAP Lumira Cloud.

 

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Donatas Budrys

Former Member
0 Kudos

Regarding the new cloud solution: Used to be called sap cloud for analytics...new fancy name is Orca:

 

Meet Project Orca, SAP's new, Hana-based analytics tool | ITworld

Henry_Banks
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi,

 

Definitely, Lumira Server for Teams continues in tandem with Lumira Server for BIPlatform, as the SME rather than Enterprise offering.

 

Regards,
H

Donatas
Participant
0 Kudos

Peter and Henry,

 

Thank you both for your feedback. It was very helpful.

 

Best regards,

Donatas Budrys

sylvainchevalle
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Matthew is writing a good overview blog regarding the actual offering and their feature covering.

 

http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/SAP+Lumira+Product+Feature+Matrix

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello Nicolas,

 

we used LS4H and test on LS4BIP right now.


One advantage of LS4H is that it used to access visualizations through HANA's xsengine, which is able to authenticate users via SAP logon tickets. Also we could share direct links to these visualizations, which we have been able to integrate directly into any custom web based UI (no matter if it runs on a mobile device or not).


Also all our HANA endusers are restricted users and they have been able to consume visualizations saved on LS4H with these restricted accounts where they directly authenticated with a valid SAP logon ticket.


With LS4BIP I am mainly missing the possibility of direct links to specific visualizations

and HANA authentication via SAP logon ticket.


Even if we solve the issue with restricted users (I've seen a new role for restricted users to allow JDBC connections in HANA SP10) we would still need a possibility to connect the user to HDB while only having a restricted user with no password.


We will try to establish the trust between SAP BI platform and HANA via SAML, but will this work for restricted users without password when connecting via JDBC?


And if there is a feature on LS4BIP with direct links in future, would we be able to still integrate these into a custom UI in a way that the user automatically authenticates to BI platform server and than onto the required back-end HANA system without ever seeing any logon screen?


Thank you

Florian



Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello Florian,

the plan is to provide direct links to visualization, stories and documents in the up-coming release and the authentication would be via the BI Platform

0 Kudos

Thanks for the great article - where do we find LS4BIP?  I've looked in service market place and can't find it there.

Henry_Banks
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi,

 

it's under : installations > analytics > lumira server for biplatform > installation

 

the current is SP28, with SP29 scheduled soon

 

Regards

H

0 Kudos

Hi Henry, I checked there I don't have it listed.   If I have a license for BI EDGE 4.1 should I still see it?

 

For some reasons Lumira Server for EDGE is still for sale on the store.sap.com site - but I was told that I need LS4BIP instead now...

Former Member
0 Kudos

LS4BIP is included as part of the BI Suite license, Please contact your SAP account manager on SAP Lumira, Edge edition

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi

Thank you for posting!

 

Question: when will we have LS4BIP  for BI Platform running on UNIX (e.g. IBM AIX). For what I know, it´s only avaliable for BI Platform running Windows, It´s that right?

 

Cheers

Henry_Banks
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi,

 

that's right - UNIX is a much asked for requirement for LS4BIP . but I believe this is planned for H2 2016 and not before..

 

.. But  don't forget you can 'extend' your Unix BIPlatform by adding Windows processing servers to the cluster, making it a 'heterogenous'  deployment. Note that only the 2 (or more) CMS -tiers need to be on the same OS type

 

Regards,

H

FCI
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hello Nicolas,

 

Great document that clarifies the roadmap of the different Lumira tools.

 

Can you confirm that the SAP BI Mobile application can't access Lumira document stored in the Lumira Server for BIP ? You marked "Mobile BI" as unsupported yet in your tab.

 

What are we supposed to use if we want to publish a Lumira document on tablet today ?

 

Regards,

Frederic

JohnL
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Donatas, check this link out as well: SAP Cloud for Analytics

Donatas
Participant
0 Kudos

Thank you, John,

 

Yes, something great is coming and I've already requested an invite .

 

Best regards,

Donatas Budrys

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello Frédéric,

with Lumira, server for BIP 1.29 and Mobile BI Application for iOS 6.3 you can view, refresh and interact with a Lumira document on the iPad.

you just save a Lumira document from the Lumira Desktop to any folder on the BIP, and your dont have to put it into any categories, all Lumira documents the user has access to will be displayed on the iPad

 

thomas

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello

 

We had Lumira for HANA running on the same HANA DB with S4HANA sFin 2.0 1503.

 

Our SPS on HANA was 10 and it worked very well providing a direct access to ERP tables real time reporting on the same HANA appliance.

 

A week ago we upgraded HANA DB to SPS11 and our Lumira for HANA stopped working, while we received SAP answer:

 

SAP Lumira, server version for SAP HANA is not supported on SAP HANA

SPS11 per the Product Availability Matrix and per SAP Knowledge Base

Article "2254482 - How do I upgrade my SAP Lumira, server version for

SAP HANA machine to SAP HANA SPS11?". As detailed in the article you

must remain on SAP HANA SPS10 if you wish to use SAP Lumira, server

version for SAP HANA until it retires on September 30, 2016. There are

no plans to implement support for SAP HANA SPS11 in SAP Lumira, server

version for SAP HANA.

 

If upgrading to SAP HANA SPS11 is a requirement for other reasons then

you will need to switch to the SAP Lumira, server version for SAP BI

Platform solution which will eventually support SAP HANA SPS 11.


If we will switch to SAP Lumira server version for SAP BI - how could we do so if our HANA DB runs on Linux SUSE 11.3 while SAP Lumira Server for BI Platform 1.29 runs only on Windows (64B) ?


The whole idea was to have all SAP Products - S4HANA, Lumira and SMP3.0 on our same HANA Appliance, which currently I see SPS 11 with additional CDS capabilities upgrade a step backwards due to SAP Lumira not to be able to run on the same appliance with our S4HANA.


Could you please comment?


Thank you in advance,

Adi

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi

 

is this a firm roadmap about LS4BIP for Unix at H2 2016 ?

I didn´t see any official sap doc/note about this. If you have, could you please share?

 

regards

Tse

ashutosh_rastogi
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Adi,

 

You may look at the possibility of deploying Lumira in a Heterogeneous way for your Linux Landscape Deploying Lumira Server for BI Platform on Non ... | SCN

 

Regards,

Ashutosh

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello,

 

 

A customer that I work with is exploring Lumira as a potential visualization tool(against other non-SAP tools). One of the primary concerns with Lumira was that the desktop client requires 64-bit configuration. My understanding was that this wasn't a problem because Lumira cloud was also growing feature-rich and the gap with the desktop version was aggressively reducing.

 

 

But, I understand now that Lumira Server for BIP is SAP's roadmap and not Lumira cloud.

 

 

My question to those who have familiarity with Lumira server for BIP - besides the security, collaboration, source system connectivity etc. provided by BIP, would I also have a web based Lumira visualization building ability(Similar to the cloud interface we have now)? Basically can we rely entirely on Lumira server for BIP  without using the desktop client ?

 

 

Thanks,

Prabhu

vincentdechandon
Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi Thomas.

 

Are custom extensions supported in Lumira BIP 1.29+ also supported in the Mobile BI Application?

 

Br,

 

Vincent

ashutosh_rastogi
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Not yet.

 

- Ashutosh

vincentdechandon
Contributor
0 Kudos

Thanks Ashutosh. Do you have any release version it will (should at least) be included in? 1.30?

 

Br,

Vincent

ashutosh_rastogi
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Mobile BI App releases are not tied to Lumira Releases. It should be available in future releases of Mobile BI App.

 

Regards,

Ashutosh

vincentdechandon
Contributor
0 Kudos

Ok my bad, I though it was something on Lumira BIP side.

I'll also stay tuned to Mobile BI App releases so.

 

Br,

Vincent

jim_oreilly
Discoverer
0 Kudos

Hi,

 

I'm very confused.  SAP Lumira is listed as a additional product in the SAP Business One Price List.  As such we sell it as the Ad-Hoc reporting tool for B1.   Many customers use the SAP Lumira Cloud as a method of distributing their Business One visualizations.  They have upgraded to 1.29 Lumira and suddenly this feature is no longer available. This is not good.   It sounds like they will now have to buy something different in order to retain the functionality they already had.   Is this correct?

Joe_Peters
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Thanks for a great article.  One question - we are currently not using HANA at all.  Is there any benefit for us to use HANA as a calculation engine for LS4BIP?  i know that as of 1/2016, BI Suite includes a limited-use license for HANA with Lumira, and I am trying to understand any benefits from using it.

former_member183781
Active Participant

Totally agree 100% with Jim O'Reilly. The loss of an "inexpensive / anonymous" method to share content via the SAP LUMIRA CLOUD public-link method is a BIG drop in Functionality.

 

 

 

Example - https://cloud.saplumira.com/open?key=54E3BF0DC3571745E10000000A4E4243&type=HANALYTIC

 

Having to buy an Individual NAMED license for every possible consumer of your Hosted content in SAP Cloud for Analytics is an impossible model for Public-Disclosure reporting via SAP Lumira tools.

 

Hopefully, SAP will find a per-request/view impression license for those use-cases.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Excellent article and very good explanation. Now i have a question. What will be the best form to run the Lumira files on mobile devices? Because the Lumira Cloud is going out of service.

 

Regards.

vincentdechandon
Contributor
0 Kudos

With the 1.31 version you can consume Lumira stories through SAP Mobile BI App (custom extensions are not supported tho). It works fine using BOE system, not sure if you can do the same with Lumira For Teams tho.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Br,

Vincent

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi Vincent,

 

I did the test. But i follow the steps and the Lumira file doesn't appear in the Sap BusinessObjects Mobile (the only app available on PlayStore to run BI documents) I have installed the Lumira Server 1.31 and BI Server 4.2 SP02.

Thanks for the help.

 

Regards.