Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1

bi@xoomworks.com | www.xoomworks.com/bi
Why Upgrade?
Agenda
Planning Phase
Design & Installation
The Upgrade
Xoomworks BI
Summary Checklist

Why Upgrade?

New Features and Functionality
 Better performance through query stripping and auto-refresh functionality
 Improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
 Smart visualizations
 Information Design Tool – a new semantic layer design tool
 Enhancements across the entire product suite
- Download and study the ‘BI Platform Feature by Version Matrix’
Reduce TCO with Cloud solutions
 Hybrid deployments (data on premise, BI in the cloud)
 Fully cloud-hosted BI solutions
Why Upgrade? Planning Phase Design & Installation The Upgrade Summary Checklist Xoomworks

Improved functionality for platform administration
 Near Zero Downtime (NZDT) data back up method
 Parallel patching
 System health monitoring with embedded monitoring functionality
 Fully embedded promotion management
 Improved auditing that collects data on system usage
New Mobile Functionality and Self-Service BI Features
 SAP BusinessObjects Mobile app for iOS, Android and BlackBerry
 More straight forward and intuitive self-service BI through SAP Lumira, SAP Business
Explorer and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis

Planning Phase

Planning
 Upgrading to BI 4.1 can be complex, even for smaller scale deployments
 Careful assessment and thorough planning of upgrade activities is essential
 Ensure you gather all the requirements for the upgrade during planning
 Understand the common challenges and leverage the collective experience of others
 Understand the different upgrade scenarios and make an educated decision about what is
right for your business

Engage and Partner
 During planning, engage with various stakeholders, such as administrators, DBAs, BI content
designers and end users to plan the upgrade
 Engage end users right from the start
- Treating the end user as a partner is crucial for a successful project outcome
- Uncover the “hidden” needs of all users categories with regards to the existing BI solution
- Ensure business gets the best out of the new BI solution, e.g. better self-service capabilities
- Identify skill gaps and build training plans with the business, for the business

Governance
 Employ and harness good governance processes
 Accountability
 Transparency and Communication
 Issue and risk management
 Change Control

Update:
Move from BI 4.0 to BI 4.1 - Can
almost be compared to installing
a support pack
Upgrade:
Move from XIR2/XI 3.x to BI 4.1 -
Direct Upgrade Path. Involves:
• Migration of the repository
• May need redesign of security
model
• New hardware required ( to
accommodate 64-bit
architecture)
• Comprehensive planning and
testing
Migration:
Move from pre-XIR2 to BI 4.1-
no direct upgrade path.
Requires:
• Intermediate step to XIR2/XI
3.1*
• Security model needs to be
reviewed
• DeskI conversion to WebI will
play a big role
* depending on the
source version

Complete Upgrade
Big bang upgrade scenario where all content is migrated in one go
• Best suited for small
deployments.
• Reduces total time
taken.
• Reduces number of
systems to be
maintained during
upgrade.
• Requires lockdown of entire
system
• Longer downtime of your BI
system
• Potentially wide spreading
impact of upgrade issues
• Challenging to check all
upgraded content in large
deployments

Incremental Upgrade
Incremental Upgrade means to upgrade content: step by step, department by department.
• Requires lockdown of each
department folder, one at a
time.
• Parallel maintenance of two
systems.
• More complex to execute.
• Best suited for medium and
large deployments.

Migration Tools
• Upgrade Management Tool
- Upgrades BI content directly from XIR2 and XI 3.x environments
• Import Wizard
- Required to migrate from pre-XIR2 deployments to intermediate XI 3.1 environment
• Promotion Management Tool
- Integrated in CMC
- Moves BI content within the BI landscape from “like system to like system”, e.g. from DEV to TEST
• Report Conversion Tool
- Converts Desktop Intelligence reports to Web Intelligence format

Understand Product Changes – BI Platform
 New binaries require a complete new installation
 New audit schema means historical audit data is not kept
- Requires planning for a workaround
 BI Launch Pad replaces InfoView with new functionality
- Migrating MyInfoView and InfoView objects converts to BI workspaces and workspace modules
 Dashboard Builder is now BI Workspace
 Corporate, Personal and My InfoView Dashboards have become BI Workspaces
- Some analytics may have to be recreated in Dashboard Designer
 Encyclopedia/Discussion and Performance Manager have gone EOL
 Search has a new search technology in BI4. The search index will be re-built in BI4.

Understand Product Changes – BI Clients I
 Desktop Intelligence has gone EOL
- Requires converting DeskI reports to WebI format
- Possibility to deploy DeskI Compatibility Pack (DCP) for intermediate timespan and delay DeskI
conversion to later stage in project
 Web Intelligence
- Corrections and changes to the Calculation Engine in BI 4.x compared to XIR2 and XI 3.x.
- Requires editing formula and variable definitions in some cases
- New charting engine (Common Visualization Object Model)
- new and enhanced hierarchical capabilities, such as hierarchical and level-based member selection,
hierarchical prompting, hierarchical charting and hierarchical navigation in reports
 Xcelsius 2008 replaced by BusinessObjects Dashboards
- Flash files continue to work, Conversion to new format optional but adds new features
(e.g. globalization, UNX queries, etc.)

Understand Product Changes – BI Clients II
 Universe Design Tool (UNV universes)
- Coexisting with new design tool (Information Design Tool)
- No changes to previous version, universes and designer as in XI3.x
 Lifecycle Management Tool
- Integrated in BI4, no separate installation required.
 Report Conversion Tool
- supports Online to Online mode and conversion of DeskI reports based on Freehand-SQL and
Stored Procedures (BI 4.1 SP05)
 Translation Manager
- Integrated in BI4 clients, features parity with XI3.1 maintained, retains all previous translations
 WDeploy integrated in BI4 (WDeploy GUI also available)
 Import Wizard has been replaced by Upgrade Management Tool

Understand Product Changes – Other Components
 Integration Kits for SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JDEdwards and Oracle
- Integrated in BI4, separate installation no longer required.
 Data Federator
- Partially integrated in BI4. Existing DF3.x deployments remain compatible with BI4.
 Live Office
- No change, existing documents continue to work, but client machines need to be updated.
 Mobile
- Fully integrated in BI4. Local content has to be moved with UMT.
- Mobile XI3.1 and BI4 may coexist on the device, but parameters need to be re-set or copied
 Query as a Web Service (QaaWS)
- No change. QaaWS will continue to work after the upgrade.
- UMT detects dependencies to UNV universes, Dashboards on QaaWS will continue to work.

Understand Product Changes – Parameters & Customization
 Security and Authentication settings for Windows AD
No upgrade, needs to be set up in BI4.
 Reporting databases connectivity
- No upgrade, connections require to be set up in BI4.
 BOE Server configuration and Web Application configuration settings
- No upgrade. These require to be set up in BI4.

Understand Product Changes – Parameters & Customization II
 BOE specific settings
- Moved from Web.xml file to properties file.
 InfoView Customization (pictures, logos, etc.)
- No upgrade. These are required to be set up in BI4.
 Custom Java code
- Requires validation whether custom code still works in BI4 for custom Java code that is using the BOE
SDK and Report Engine SDK. Some of the Java functions can be deprecated.

Update: from BI 4.0 to BI 4.1
• No changes to the security
model
Upgrade:
From XIR2/XI3.x to BI 4.1
• Changes to the security
model
• Carefully analyse the
changes and their impact
on your security model
• Decide whether or not to
redesign your security
model
Migration:
From pre-XIR2 to BI 4.1
• New security model
• You must redesign
your security model
Understand Product Changes – Security Model

Clean Up Your BI Content
 Include a plan to carefully assess your current environment and understand which BI content has
to be migrated
 Take the opportunity to clean up your BI content BEFORE you upgrade
- Audit your system to understand which BI content may have become redundant
- Detect and delete un-used reports after an inventory check with the business
- Only migrate required content to the new environment to reduce risks, time and cost
- Fix or delete scheduled jobs that are paused or failed
- Remove older report instances or un-used instances
 Fix repository inconsistencies!

Reduce Risk – Essential Testing
 Reduce risk by including several test stages in your upgrade plan
- Set up a sandbox environment for BI 4.1 platform and client testing
- Plan thorough discovery and testing of new products, features and functions
- Schedule tests to estimate the time required for the upgrade
- Security and content testing
 Ensure you identify what needs to be tested after the upgrade and by whom
- UAT by business users (most important, most frequently used, most critical reports and dashboards,
universes, BI content in inboxes and personal folders, etc.)
- Repeat testing and validation in each environment after migrating content through the BI 4.1 landscape
(e.g. development to test to acceptance to production)
- Final user validation after release into production system

Reduce Risk – design and allow time for a comprehensive test plan
 Compatibility tests with existing systems
 System performance and stability tests
- Plan for extensive performance and system tests to avoid rude awakening
 Plan and perform a pre-upgrade test on a specially modelled sample scenarios
- Set up a sample group with related sample access levels and related sample application to test an
incremental upgrade without dependencies
- Set up a sample folder, objects, and instances related to previous test run, this time to test an
incremental upgrade with dependencies
- Perform tests after the test upgrades to see whether the incremental upgrade with security works

Training – A Must for User Acceptance and Enablement
 Appropriate training is an essential part of change management and user acceptance of the new
system
- Carefully evaluate training needs for end users, administrators and developers so they acquire the
skillsets required for an efficient and successful upgrade
 End users should receive training depending on the products and functionality they will be using
- Create training plans according to the required skill sets
 Schedule training sessions close to the actual production rollout and consider refresher sessions
after go live
 Business users involved in testing will require training earlier than the general user base

Design & Installation

Design – BI 4.1 Solution Architecture
• Verify the Product Availability Matrix (PAM) whether your third party components are supported
and compliant with 64-bit technology
• Size your new deployment to properly deploy your BI system!
- Determine which hardware you require for your new system work
- You will require more hardware than before, especially memory
- Decide whether to deploy on physical servers or on virtual machines, on Windows or Unix/Linux
- Refer to ‘Sizing and Deploying SAP BI 4 and SAP Lumira’
• Include best practices for service tuning, especially the APS
• Consult BI 4 Pattern books to architect your solution
• Do not forget about authentication, monitoring, auditing, lifecycle management, backup,
recovery, etc.

Installation
• Set up your new BI landscape with the latest version of the software, e.g. BI 4.1 SP05
• Consult official documentation for the installation and all configuration tasks
- Installation Guide for XIR2 SP02 / XI 3.1 SP07 (only for indirect upgrade paths)
- BI 4.1 Update Guide (if updating your environment from BI 4.0)
- BI 4.1 Installation and Upgrade Guides (for both direct and indirect upgrade paths)
• Customise and configure your new deployment as per sizing in Design phase
• Apply best practices for service tuning (APS, WIPS, etc.)
• Perform thorough system and performance tests after the installation

The Upgrade

Time to perform the actual upgrade:
Execute the pre-upgrade tasks (see next slide)
Upgrade using the Upgrade Management Tool
(more about UMT in this presentation)
Execute post-upgrade tasks and testing

Pre-Upgrade Tasks
 Check network connectivity and access to the source and target machines
 Check logon access to source and target machines using the UMT
 Disable OS updates and stop anti-virus processes in all source and target machines
 Pause all scheduled objects and delete unwanted and failed object instances
 Clear the CMC temporary storage in your source system

Pre-Upgrade Tasks II
 Run the Repository Diagnostics Tool (RDT) on source and target systems
 Disable auditing on your source and target systems
 Windows AD and SAP authentication types
- Disable on source system and enable on the target system
 Stop the BI platform servers on source and target systems
 Create OLAP connections on the target system

The Upgrade Management Tool (UMT)
 The UMT is a one-stop, thick-client Java tool to upgrade BI content from XIR2 and XI 3.x to
BI4.
- UMT centralises upgrade workflows into a single location, replacing the Import Wizard and DB
Migration tools.
- Supports both upgrade workflows (full and incremental)
 UMT can be a resource intensive tool, depending on your content migration size
- It can consume large amounts of memory and temp disc space.
- Run UMT on a dedicated machine with maximum resource allocation (RAM, CPU, disk space)
- Configure the UMT
• Disk space: allocate a minimum of twice the file store size available
• Java Heap Size: allocate as much RAM as possible for better overall UMT performance and
stability

Using UMT - Scenarios
UMT allows for two Upgrade scenarios: BIAR to Live and Live to Live
 BIAR to Live
- Required when source and target systems cannot be connected
- Allows for keeping a content snapshot and re-starting the upgrade process from the snapshot
- Use small BIAR files (max 10,000 objects or 1GB)
 Live to Live
- Optimized for a large amount of objects
- Requires source and target systems up and running
- Ports must be opened between source and target
 Tracing the UMT
- Set up tracing for the UMT if you run into issues
- Review the log files after the upgrade and group common errors into issue types

UMT Best Practices
 Upgrade your BI content from source PRD to TEST in your target system
 If you have many objects in one step consider breaking these up in further increments, e.g.
objects names starting with A-I, then J-Q, and R-Z.
 After validation and tests promote BI content from TEST to DEV and PRD respectively,
using Promotion Management in BI 4.1 (integrated in the CMC)
 The order of the content import needs to be carefully planned. A recommended order of
iterative content import is as follows:
- Users and User Groups
- Universes, connections and other content dependencies
- Everything else EXCEPT Users and User Groups, Universes, Folders and Objects
- Folders and Objects

Post-Upgrade Tasks I
After completion of all the upgrade increments you will need to perform a number of post-
upgrade tasks:
 Enabling 3rd party authentication
- Windows AD and SAP authentication types must be enabled on the target machine
 All BI servers that were disabled prior to the upgrade must be restarted
 Create all 64-bit Data Source Names (DSNs) and DB client configurations on target
machine
- DSNs need to be manually set up to re-establish connectivity to the data sources of the
documents

Post-Upgrade Tasks II
 Post-Upgrade Testing
- After DSN creation and all servers are running carry out upgrade tests defined during planning,
e.g. comparing security restrictions, opening, refreshing and scheduling reports, etc.
 Re-enable auditing on the target machine
 Install and run the ‘BI Platform Support Tool’
- Helps you to compare content of the target machine after upgrade
 Resume all document schedules
- As you had to pause all schedules in the source system prior to the upgrade these must be
resumed again (using Instance Manager in the CMC)
 Re-enable OS updates and anti-virus on all the machines

Desktop Intelligence Report Conversion Tool (RCT)
 As Desktop Intelligence is no longer part of the BI product suite you will need to convert
your DeskI reports to WebI format
- Use the Report Conversion Tool to convert Desktop Intelligence XI R2 and XI 3.x reports to Web
Intelligence 4.1 format
 Thoroughly plan the conversion to Web Intelligence
- Complex reports may not convert without issues
- Conversion of reports based on FHSQL and Stored Procedures possible with BI 4.1 SP05 but not
all convert without issues
- Run RCT to collect conversion results audit data
- Evaluate results during the planning phase
• Number of reports that convert without any issues
• Estimate the amount of rework that will be required

Desktop Intelligence Report Conversion Tool (RCT)
 Decide whether or not to convert a report or rebuild in BI 4.1 and where to solve the issues
(DeskI or WebI)
 Archive converted .rep documents after conversion to keep the CMS clean
 Three different workflows possible for the conversion and migration of DeskI to WebI
reports
- Check ‘Recommendations for Conversion Using the Report Conversion Tool’

Desktop Intelligence Compatibility Pack (DCP)
 Enables you to view migrated DeskI reports in BI 4.1 CMS connecting from XI 3.1 clients
- Does not replace the need to convert to WebI but enables you to shorten the upgrade to BI 4.1
by postponing DeskI conversion to later
- DCP is supported until the end of 2017 (Windows XP/2003 and Vista not supported)
- Light Schedule functionality using the Windows scheduling functionality
- Only client-side consumption of .rep content
 Requires client machines to be updated to Client Tools XI 3.1 SP6 or later
- Requires side-by-side installation of WebI Rich Client 4.1, Universe Design Tool 4.1 and Report
Conversion Tool 4.1
- DCP was first delivered with FP 6.1 and must be applied after 4.1 client tool installation
- Or apply the corresponding FP if already on a higher version FP than 6.1

Universe conversion from UNV to UNX format
 Relational UNV can be converted to new UNX format
 Convert existing UNV to UNX only if you require new IDT functionality in legacy universes
 Start using UNX universes if you want to make use of new multi-source capabilities and
other new features
 Consider keeping UNV universes during the migration where possible and convert to UNX
format at a later stage
 Consider new universe development in IDT
 IDT requires additional training

“Having the strong technical capability of Xoomworks behind
us has enabled us to prove what SAP BusinessObjects can
achieve, and that’s how we’ve managed to build up and
maintain a single platform concept for all our management
information.”
The Solution Delivery Manager for a major petro-chemical company.
“Their consultants were very diligent, spending a lot of
time working on the material for the training so that they
were very well prepared for the sessions.”
Raf Wayne, CTO, Neural Technologies Limited.

THANK YOU
To find out more:
Visit our website at www.xoomworks.com
Email us at bi@xoomworks.com

Resource Library
1. BI Platform Feature by Version Matrix
2. Sizing and Deploying SAP BI 4 and SAP Lumira
3. BI Platform Support Tool
4. Recommendations for Conversion Using the Report Conversion Tool

Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1

Similar to Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1

Editor's Notes