Monday, July 22, 2024

Webinar Summary -
BusinessObjects 2025 Olympic Relay: Your Ultimate Guide to BI 2025 and Beyond

In a recent webinar, DataSense, APOS, and Need4Viz combined to provide a clear picture of the road ahead for SAP BusinessObjects, and what it means for organizations committing to following that road.

View the BusinessObjects 2025 Olympic Relay webinar on demand

The short version of the roadmap is that SAP BusinessObjects will continue to thrive into the foreseeable future, and enthusiasts are no longer in "wait-and-see" mode.

DataSense

Gary Bernstein from DataSense Solutions opened the session with the agenda:

• DataSense Solutions: Understanding the BusinessObjects Roadmap -BI 2025 and Beyond
• APOS: Key Steps to Win the Race to BI 2025
• Need4Viz: Enhance, Improve & Extend the Value of Web Intelligence Reporting

Gary then gave a brief overview of the history and services provided by DataSense.

Gary then explained the "Olympic Relay" theme for the webinar. With the Paris Olympics approaching, we saw the similarities between a relay race, the emerging structure of this webinar, and the many tasks that have to be accomplished in a particular order for your organization to reach the "finish line" of a stable, effective and efficient BI 2025 deployment. There are parallels with all of the elements successful athletes and teams engage to achieve their objectives.

Yes, the world of business is extremely competitive, but great success does not happen without creative collaboration, and it is in that spirit that we discuss the complementary offerings of DataSense, APOS and Need4Viz as the means to help your organization finish strong.

Gary gave a concise summary of the roadmap, including support options, and what it means for organizations continuing down that road.

It is important to note that the main code line established in BI 4 will continue through BI 2025, providing essential stability, and making upgrades more manageable. View the webinar on demand for more information.

Next, Gary looked at tools that will be deprecated in BI 2025 and your options for replacing workflows that currently use those tools.

There are three principles driving innovation in BI 2025:

• Reach more business users
• Increase power users' productivity
• Reduce total cost of ownership

Gary reviewed the improvements that are based on these principles, including:

• New dynamic visualization and specialized elements
• New document format and the ability to deliver data insights offline
• Tailored experiences and simplified report generation
• Simplified migration projects
• Improved use of standard authentication protocols to increase compatibility between systems
• Immediate access to important information and reduction of display times
• Crystals Reports streamlining and improvements

Gary then passed the baton to Alan Golding of APOS.

APOS

Alan started with a visual recap of the road ahead through BI 2025, BI 2027, and the implied BI 2029.

Alan summarized the steps organizations need to follow to reach BI 2025 success.

The steps are:

Take stock of what you have
• Assess & action unsupported content
• Right-size your system content
• Upgrade platform to version 4.3
• Upgrade Universes to UNX format
• Automate for efficient management

View the webinar on demand for more information.

After describing each of these steps in detail, Alan drilled down into use cases in which APOS can help.

UNV deprecation is a major storyline in the roadmap, because repointing Web Intelligence reports to UNX universes manually is a resource- and time-intensive process

APOS automation simplifies this process, reducinig the potential for human error, and validating the success of the conversion and repointing processes.

The APOS Web Intelligence Migrator solution provides the project-based automation to simplify and expedite these processes for organizations of any size.

Alan went into significant detail on these processes. View the webinar on demand for more information.

Alan then moved on to a second use case involving streamlining system content.

How do you know whether content is still useful or not? You have to overcome the poor visibility within the BI platform and the labor-intensive manual processes required to reveal this information.

Alan described how the APOS Insight solution can help you overcome these barriers. View the webinar on demand for more information.

Next, Alan described time consuming upgrade steps and how to simplify them by applying automation.

Automation allow you to simplify these steps:

• Rebuild and manage system security, perferences, settings
• Rebuild and manage system schedules
• Granular content promotion
• Report testing and validation
• Process validation

Alan summarized how APOS technology makes upgrades more manageable, from migration execution through content validation. View the webinar on demand for more information.

Alan then passed the baton to Michael Trickey and Dallas Marks of Need4Viz

Need4Viz

Michael started with a brief desc ription of Need4Viz and its expertise, which includes:

• Data analysis
• Visualization
• Distribution
• SAP BusinessObjects environment

Michael's focus was on N4V for WebI, a no-code, plug'n'play add-on for Web Intelligence that includes 60+ widgets. The result is the addition of power to SAP BusinessObjects.

Need4Viz's Four in One Solution includes:

• DataViz, Interactive Graphics & Direct navigation
• Online & Offline mapping for unlimited representation
• Data Analysis
• Dynamic sharing of WebI reports

Need4Viz takes a good product - Web Intelligence - and simply makes the Web Intelligence experience better, with data analytics and navigation capabililties, and dashboards containing numerous widgets and geo-mapping.

HTML export allows users to get the Web Intelligence experience outside of SAP BusinessObjects.

Dallas Marks then provided a live demo of N4V for WebI.

Go here for an interactive look at this demo.

Q&A

There was a substantial Q&A session at the end of the presentation. View the webinar on demand to hear the range of questions and answers.