Tag: Architecture

Ghosts in the Database

Posted on by EV Technologies

It is a little early in the year for ghost stories, but this chilling tale can’t quite wait for the leaves to change and the apple cider to harden. Let me spin my haunting tale. Come with me if you dare.

It was a dark and stormy night. Storm clouds billowed in the distance in the light of the full moon, punctuated by the occasional flash of lightning, foreshadowing the torrential storm to come.The shiny new BI4 system hummed quietly along after the day’s successful upgrade of content from XI 3.1. Then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the DBA’s paged me, your humble on-call BOE Administrator, saying the database is going crazy with queries. The source of all of the queries is the BI4 system. But how can that be? The system is brand new. Nobody is logged in yet. There are no scheduled jobs yet.

Migrating Imported Groups between BusinessObjects Instances

Posted on by EV Technologies

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?

Posted on by EV Technologies

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?

Enforcing HTTPS for Secure SAP BusinessObjects BI4

Posted on by EV Technologies

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

Posted on by EV Technologies

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)

BI4 is a Big Baby

Posted on by EV Technologies

Anybody that has been in the BusinessObjects Admin area of expertise for a long time knows that with each upgrade, the platform requirements get bigger and more substantial. The new BI4 is no exception. While that is the underpinnings of this post, what I really want to hit on is the role that virtualization will or will not play in the future of BI4.

Looking Ahead to BI 4 Part 1

Posted on by EV Technologies

I’ve had a number opportunities to see BI 4 from both the perspectives of a demonstration as well as hands on. The more I see it, the more excited I get for what lies ahead for us. So as I try and fight my way through a two-month case of writer’s block, I intend to start gearing us all up for what we need to start considering to strategize for those well-planned upgrades (you know you want to). The first thing I want to tackle being an “all-things-server” lover, is what the new semantic layer means to your environment.