SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Support Pack 6

Posted on by EV Technologies

Today, April 30, 2013, SAP released SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 Support Pack 6 (SP6) to the SAP Service Marketplace.  Support Pack 6 is not a groundbreaking release, but brings a long list of fixes and some additional platform support. Back in January when we reviewed the current state of the BI 4.0 upgrade (see related article State of the BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Upgrade), customers were trapped between the Scylla of Support Pack 4 with no mobile dashboard support and the Charybdis of critical missing patches in Support Pack 5.

Fixes

Support Pack 6 includes the following:

  • Support Pack 5 (SP5) functionality, particularly mobile support for Dashboards and Design Studio
  • Support Pack 5 (SP5) patches 5.1 – 5.5
  • Support Pack 4 (SP4) patches 4.4 – 4.11

Support packs from SAP are typically DOA as they still omit the latest patches from previous releases.  Support Pack 6 is no exception to this rule.  You’ll have to wait for Patch 6.1 to fold in outstanding Patches 4.12-4.14 and Patches 5.6-5.7.

SAP BI4 SP5 and higher put everything in one place on Windows Start Menu
SAP BI4 SP5 and higher put all desktop applications, including Crystal Reports and Dashboards, in one place on Windows Start Menu

Platform Support

Support Pack 6 adds support for Microsoft Windows 8, Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 (on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2008).  It also includes Java 7 support, which was first added to Support Pack 5.  Support Pack 6 also depreciates some older technologies, one of which is Microsoft SQL Server 2005, which I find curious.

I was hoping that Support Pack 6 would replace the default web application server with Tomcat 7 just like the recently released SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 SP6.  It doesn’t, but you can manually install and use Tomcat 7 if you like, as it’s been on the Supported Platforms/Platform Availability Matrix (PAM) for the past few releases.

Next Steps

As always, you should install a new patch level in a sandbox for evaluation before committing it to your software development lifecycle.  You should also plan on regression testing a small yet diverse sample of content in your development environment before moving to the next higher environment.

We are taking our own advise and presently installing Support Pack 6 in our development lab.  We’ll have more to say about BI 4.0 Support Pack 6 over the next few days and weeks.  Until then.

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