SAP BI 4.0 Migration with APOS Solutions

Enterprise software platform migration is not for the faint of heart, and business intelligence systems have their own set of difficulties in:

  • Strategy/Optimization
  • Security
  • Performance
  • Operational Maintenance
  • Compliance

Your migration due diligence will take you to all five of these areas -- what we call the five pillars of well managed BI.

As BI becomes more mission critical within enterprises, the stakes and risks of migration rise, and timelines get shorter. If BI is critical to your decision-making workflows, then every minute that timely, accurate information is unavailable costs your company in competitive advantage, top-line revenues, and bottom-line profits.

How APOS Solutions Can Help You Migrate to SAP BI 4.0

SAP's Migration Best Practice Guide separates migration preparation into system considerations and content considerations. APOS solutions help you with both.

System Considerations - APOS Insight, IDAC

System issues require fundamental decisions, because this is the time to get your system architecture and resources right. To get the new system right, you need to start by examining your current SAP BusinessObjects environment, finding the bottlenecks, and understanding who is doing what, where, and when.

APOS solutions that will help you understand and resolve system issues:

  • APOS Insight provides a complete snapshot of what is happening at any given time within your SAP BI system. You can extract information about your system before the migration, then after the migration, and compare them. You can see where reports have moved to in the new deployment. You can map IDs in one system to IDs in the other. You can compare the security structures between the two environments to ensure groups are in place, users are in groups and all are properly permissioned, eliminating security holes.
  • APOS Intelligent Data Access Controller (IDAC) gives you deep knowledge of your BI system's data connections. It lets you monitor and manage data connections, and logs queries for further analysis. In preparation for migration, you can use IDAC to analyze data access and plan for maximum performance for your information consumers.

Content Issues - APOS Administrator, Storage Center

BI administrators use some APOS solutions such as Administrator, Storage Center, and Publisher on a daily basis to simplify and automate content operations, and these solutions will be of invaluable assistance in dealing with content migration issues.

APOS solutions that will help you resolve content issues:

  • APOS Administrator automates and simplifies object, instance, and schedule management. During migration, reports are typically relocated. Use APOS Administrator to save, import, batch modify, and export schedules. Migrate recurring document instances easily.
  • Storage Center makes it easy to back up, archive and selectively restore your documents of record in a secure and timely manner — essential to ensuring regulatory compliance and meeting the needs of your information consumers, particularly when you are limiting the amount of content you are migrating.
  • APOS Publisher is a complete publishing solution for SAP BusinessObjects, allowing you to maintain consistent document bursting, consolidation and delivery processes across multiple versions of SAP BusinessObjects.

Bulk Administration Tasks

Your migration will include some time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks such as UNV to UNX conversion, Crystal Report migration, Web Intelligence report repointing, and Desktop Intelligence report migration. APOS has a set of BI 4.0 upgrade resources to help you with these tasks. Most are available on a subscription basis.

Make your SAP BI 4.0 migration easier through APOS well managed BI solutions.

BI 4.0 Migration Resources

Why Migrate to
Business Objects 4.0?

You need not only a clear migration path, but also a clear reason to migrate. SAP's Best Practice Guide lists a number of justifications, including:

  • Data access: better integration with SAP BW, a new dimensional semantic layer, and multi-source, dimensional/relational universes;
  • Usability / Productivity: harmonized user experience across the suite, interoperability, advanced analytical insight, and new search capabilities; and
  • Cost of Ownership: integrated platform monitoring, advanced auditing capabilities, supportability and root-cause analysis, and 64-bit server architecture.

These are all attractive features, and SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 represents a significant advance in the field of business intelligence, but you will have to perform your own due diligence to make a judgement as to whether the benefits of migration (and particularly early adoption) outweigh the pains. In the final analysis, it will come down to your current and future needs analysis.