How to reset the administrator password in BusinessObjects

[Verakso]

Moderator note:

Attention: The article below corresponds to SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1. Do not follow the below solution on SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 4.x.
For resetting the administrator password on 4.x versions please see one of the below KBAs depending on your OS type:
1679970 - How to reset the Administrator password in Business Intelligence platform 4.x
1719361 - How to reset/recreate Enterprise 'Administrator' account in BI 4.x on Unix

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This is a re-post of an old entry I made years ago in a company blog. That blog is no longer active, so I have re-posted it here to maintain an archive of my own old blog entries

I have a local installed BusinessObject system on my local machine, running in a Virtual Machine for demonstration purposes, but I do not use it very often, so I tend to forget the administration password.



Luckily for me, my CMS Backend Database is running Microsoft SQL Server, and since I still have administrator access to the machine itself, then I also has access to the BusinessObjects tables in the MS SQL Server.

Note:

The approach going forward is more or less the same, if you where using Oracle. If you are using the "built-in" MySQL or Sybase SQLAnywhere, then you will need to have the root password to access the tables in these types of databases. (Maybe I'll write a later blogpost about this) First locate the table CMS_InfoObjects6 in your BusinessObjects CMS database, but the data in the table is encrypted and not in clear text, so you can not read nor simply write a new password in here.

All data is obfuscated

The trick is to delete the Administrator account from the database!

Disclaimer:

At this point I must emphasize that anything you do, you do at your own risk. Before you delete any data in the database, make sure you do have a proper backup. Neither I or Infotrust will not be held liable for any damage of data loss. So simply, open the table CMS_InfoObjects6, and delete the record with ObjectID 6, since this is the default ID for the Administrator account. If you don't believe me, try look up the ID for the Administrator account on your system

DELETE FROM dbo.CMS_InfoObjects6 WHERE ObjectID = 6

You can to test it, see that the record is actually is deleted

Then restart the Server Intelligence Agent (SIA)  in the CMC console and the Tomcat server, so we are sure any connections is flushed.

Restart the Server Intelligence Agents and Tomcat

Then open the CMC again, and then log on as Administrator but with blank password.

After restarting the service, you can check and see that the previous deleted record, had magically re-appeared.

Since the password is now blank, it is highly recommended that your change the blank password to a strong typed password right away!

So if you have access to your CMS database, resetting the Administrator password is fairly simple. Just delete the record, and the built-in logic will rebuild the Enterprise Administrator account with a blank password.
Simply because the system can not run with out an Administrator account.

A final note. All though this post is written for BusinessObjects 3.1, it can be used on 4.0 as well. It is still ObjectID = 6 there is the ID of the Administrator account. However on 4.0 the table name is CMS_InfoObjects7.