The worst thing you could possibly do is send your business users the message that “the upgrade will be long and painful but the charts will be prettier”.
Blog
Copying Universes with Access Restrictions in BOXI 3.1
In a perfect world, everything would be simple and work perfectly the first time. Sadly, such is not the case. A client recently asked me to create copies of some of their universes. The only minor catch was that two of their universes used access restrictions. No problem. Easy stuff. Or so I thought.
A Pound of Cure
Experience is the hardest teacher. And the cruelest.
I had a blog worthy experience the other night while patching a BI4 production system.
Back in the good old XIr2 days, we used to have to take a total outage to apply a server patch to BusinessObjects Enterprise. On that version, the patcher needed the services to be down in order to update them, then you would start them back up manually once you were finished. In a cluster it was the same.
Organizing Work in the Information Design Tool
I really have a love/hate relationship with the new Information Design Tool (IDT). While I do enjoy the Eclipse-based interface, the multi-panel view of universes, folders, and repositories, and more, there are certainly still the “first-major-version” woes like those that my buddy Dallas points out over at his blog. But one topic that I actually still grapple with, is in how I organize my workspace, because this topic can impact not just me, but also my extended development team.
Migrating Imported Groups between BusinessObjects Instances
If you just thought that migrating groups is not a problem since I only have one instance, then shame on you, but that is a topic for another day. Assuming you do have separate CMS’s for Development, Test, and Production, in an idea world you would set up your security in your development instance, test to make sure it works and them migrate those setting through test and into production. Unfortunately using an external authentication group prevents you migrating your groups. This is because when migrating an object between SAP BusinessObjects instance the Cluster Unique Identifier (CUID) is used. When using external groups you cannot migrate them you have to import them into each instance. This causes the same group to have a different CUID in each instance. This means that as far as SAP BusinessObjects is concerned they are not the same group.
What is the Remote Support Component?
If you’ve been an administrator of Business Objects Enterprise for a while like we have, then there are a few big questions you regularly get asked and until now have had no good answers for.
What’s going on inside of Business Objects when I run a report? Which step in the process is taking so long?
How do I know when something bad is lurking in there?
BI4 Common Semantic Layer – Our Hero?
I’m intrigued by some things I’m seeing in the community about the new Common Semantic Layer (CSL) vs. the BICS Connector in SAP BusinesssObjects BI4. Disclaimer: I am not writing to call out anyone, indicate inaccuracy in statements/tweets, etc. I just get a vibe that the CSL is not getting the love that it should. I feel compelled to warn that this is a pretty opinionated post. I generally like to stick to technical blogs, but do believe there is some value in pondering both sides of the fence in building content in SAP BusinessObjects BI4.
Using Real-Time Analytics to make the Pudge Budge
I find myself in a situation where I need to drop a few pounds. Common thoughts for this time of year, but I’m taking a different approach this time and want to blog about my experience.
Enforcing HTTPS for Secure SAP BusinessObjects BI4
Many organizations just deploy SAP BusinessObjects without a thought for securing HTTP traffic or intra-server communication. But what you probably didn’t realize is basic packet sniffing tools can allow nefarious individuals within your own walls to watch those little packets of bytes fly by with Windows AD, LDAP, or SAP Authentication tokens included within them. So what is the probability that other, mission critical applications within your organization use those same authentication tokens? High. Very high. So what is an administrator to do? Let’s dissect.
BI4 Launch Pad Default Preferences
BI4 has given administrators something they have been asking for for years: the ability to set the Default User Preferences.
Unfortunately its not the complete list of all the user preferences, but it is a good start including some of the major pain points administrators have to deal with:
- Start page customizations
- Columns displayed in Documents tab
- Document viewing location
- Maximum Number of rows to display (Yeah)
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