Information Steward 4.0 Installation and Repository Password

Recently I installed SAP BusinessObjects product suite for a client which included BI Platform, Explorer, Data Services & Information Steward. This post is not really about the installation of each product. It is rather about one of the issues that I faced while installing Information Steward.

As the prerequisite for Information Steward 4.0 includes both BI platform (especially the AJS & APS) and Job Server, IS was the last product to be installed in my list. My installation of Information Steward was going through fine until the repository configuration. The installation was able to create the repository tables but was not able to configure the repository in the CMC and it prompted me if I wanted to skip this step and proceed further. The exact message was “Information Steward Repository has failed with the following error: Extracting arguments from <INSTALL_DIR>\InformationSteward\MM\Config\MM.properties. Extracting arguments from <INSTALL_DIR>\InformationSteward\MM\Config\InstallUtility.properties”

I opened both the properties files but I couldn’t figure out any issues with the values. After a while I decided to proceed with the installation by clicking Cancel button and the installation was unable to register the license key

and it was also unable to install any of the metadata integrator components.

The same error was repeated for all the metadata integrator components. I was left almost clueless as I could not figure out what was causing the issue. To make it more interesting, I found out that the repository itself was created with all the tables. When I went into CMC to check the Information Steward repository configuration, it was empty. And unfortunately we are not allowed to configure the repository in CMC except for the user name and password.

So I was searching all the avenues to find out the cause. And the search on SAP notes for the term “ICCRepoConfig”, I ended up to finding the note 1655813. The note is relevant but did not solve my issue. In my case, the FR servers were running fine. The real hint was the log file that they have mentioned on the note – InformationSteward.MMInstallUtility_<date timestamp>.log. Until then, I wasn’t looking at this log file which was under <INSTALL_DIR>\InformationSteward\MM\log\ because the installation log was being created in the location where the setup files are.

Finally the log has provided some clue to the issue and it was something related to an unexpected “&”. Phew!! I am sure that you’d have guessed by the title of the blog. Indeed it was the password for the database repository which had “&” in it. I requested the DBA to change the password and ran through the installation from scratch, the installation did not stop anywhere bu the end successfully.

I understand that it is difficult to test the product very thoroughly but we could be provided with the right places to find the clues for potential issues such as the number of log files and their locations created during installation.