It’s time to look at 4.2: 5 reasons to upgrade your SAP Business Intelligence Platform

Are you an existing user of the SAP Business Objects Platform and tools? Are you running an early version of SAP BO (3.x or lower)? Curious to find out what the new SAP Business Objects Platform 4.2 has to offer? You’ve come to the right place.

SAP is well established in the BI market for its capacity to deliver a broad range of BI and analytic capabilities. The platform is ideal for large IT-managed enterprise reporting deployments, business-user-driven, data discovery deployments, and everything in between.

We’ve worked with many clients on the SAP Business Intelligence platform to make sure they are getting the most from their investments. In doing this, we have found the opportunity for significant benefits from a relatively simple upgrade to the latest version.

Below is a compilation of the most interesting features of the latest version of the SAP BI Platform.

Administration

  • The Administrators Cockpit is an all-in-one tool that allows IT Teams to easily monitor schedules, user activity & content consumption
  • Promotions Manager allows large BI deployment to move content between across the BI landscape multiple times in a day in a robust manner
  • Update Manager provides a wizard-like experience allowing administrators to perform complete or incremental upgrades of content developed in legacy systems in order to better use the functionality and tools of SAP BI 4.2
  • Publications allow users to subscribe to content distributed periodically, tailored to each user’s requirements via Launchpad, email, or file directory to internal or external users
  • Administrators can easily broadcast notifications to a single user or a group of them via email, Launchpad or mobile devices
  • Recycle Bin allows the recovery of accidentally deleted content in BI Launchpad

Web Intelligence

  • Web Intelligence now can have Shared Elements. These are very useful to share and manage centrally common reporting elements such as templates, footers and summary tabs
  • User commentary empowers business users to collaborate and share insights on any report
  • Web Intelligence is equipped with a highly intuitive Geo Maps visualisation component to display geographically driven information
  • Visualisation extensions allow the implementationof 3rd party components to meet specific client requirements
  • The Parallel Processing Data Provider Engine is very useful to improve the performance of dashboards, applications and reports

Design Studio

SAP BI Platform 4.x gives developers access to Design Studio (Lumira Designer) to create interactive, mobile-ready data visualisations for your business dashboards and BI applications

Lumira

  • Lumira (Lumira Discovery) is data visualisation software that makes it easy to create beautiful and interactive maps, charts, and infographics
  • Business users can import data from Excel and many other sources, perform visual BI analysis using intuitive dashboards, and securely share insights and data stories with your team

Support

Lastly, one important driving factor is the fact that SAP has stated no support will be offered from 2018 onward to versions prior to SAP BI 4.1

As well as these functional enhancements, the latest versions also introduce new deployment options and licencing constructs. If you are running an older version, particularly if you are approaching or out of support, speak to us about how you can jump ahead with 4.2.

SAP SolutionsCarlos Pachon GomezBusinessObjects