BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.1 SP01 is now GA – Installation

Last month Tammy Powlas wrote multiple blog posts on the upcoming 1.1 release of SAP Design Studio. Today SAP announced it’s GA and can be dowloaded from the SAP Market Place.

After downloading three quite large files (about 2,8 GB in total, which is way more than the previous 1.0 SP02 version) you can start the installation by clicking the WinRAR self-extracting archive.

After the extraction of all the files is complete on my laptop nothing happens ;-( so I decided to use WinRAR and extract all the archives to a specific folder and start the installation manually.

I noticed that the BIP ADD-ON files for all the different operating systems are also part of the archive. Previously the could be downloaded seperately from the SMP.

After starting the .exe which is located in the DS_CLIENT_11 folder the following extractor is started 😉

The SAP Front End Installer is started. Choose Next to install Design Studio 1.1.

I already have Design Studio 1.0 SP02 installed so the installer displays that Design Studio will be updated.

Just after a few minutes the installation is completed succesfully.

Now let’s try to start Design Studio 1.1 😉

After launching the application I’m prompted to connect to SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform. I haven’t installed the BIP ADD-ON yet, so I will skip to connect for now.

The Welcome screen of Design Studio 1.1 is displayed. One of the first things I noticed that has changed are the menu’s ‘Layout’ and ‘Search’ which offer new functionality to align components and search through your applications.

I’m curious to discover more new features so I decided to create a new Analysis Application.

Besides Desktop Browser and iPad you can now also select iPhone as a target device and their are 2 templates available. I decided to start blank however.

Let’s now try to add a datasource based on our SAP HANA system which contains eFashion data ;-).

I changed the initial view to display and create a simple crosstab.

After creating the crosstab and adding a chart based on the same data source you get a screen similar like this.

This is just a few click example of visualizing some data. I’m more interested in checking out whether Design Studio 1.1 lives up to the promise to support SSO between the BI 4.1 platform and SAP HANA since this is a crucial requirement for one of my current projects. I will write another blog post about this once I finalized the installation of the BIP ADD-ON on our Linux BI 4.1 environment.

SAP also released the documentation for Design Studio 1.1. Unfortunately while writing the blog I was not able to get access to the Administrator Guide because access was denied…

Update: The documentation is now available, including the Application Designer Guide.

Thanks for reading and I will keep you updated!