Migration/Upgrade Made Easy - SAP BO XI 3.1 web intelligence reports to BI 4.0

[Former Member]

By: Rense Varughese

Target Audience

This document would help SAP Business Objects administrators/developers easily migrate/upgrade SAP BO XI 3.1 web intelligence reports to the BI 4.0/4.1 platform.

It avoids the use of Upgrade Management Tool especially when you are not looking at migrating the entire content of BO XI 3.1 to BI 4.0/4.1.

Objective

Upgrade Management Tool is often seen as a cumbersome approach to moving content from the XI environment to the new BI 4.0/4.1 platform. Also, UDT has its restrictions for allowing complete/incremental upgrade for the Windows and Unix BO server environments. This approach will save you a lot of time and effort if your source and target BO servers are on the Unix platform, no incremental upgrade with UDT is possible and/or you are looking at migrating only a few reports.

Solution

The below steps would help you bring the .wid file from BO XI 3.1 to BI 4.0 platform

1. Open the 'Web Intelligence Rich Client' from your BO XI 3.1 client tools.

2. Import the web intelligence document you wish to have in your target BI 4.0 platform from the CMS.

3. Save the document into your local machine with the two options checked -  'Save for all users' and 'Remove document security'. This is the most important step here as it would now de-link this .wid file from the BO XI 3.1 CMS.

4. Now open the 'Web Intelligence Rich Client' from your BI 4.0 client tools and login with your BI 4.0 user credentials.

5. Browse to the location where you saved the .wid document in Step 3 and open it.

7. Change the source of this report to another universe/Bex connection.

6. Export it to the BI 4.0 repository. The report is now linked to your BI 4.0 CMS repository.

The above steps can also be followed for .unv files using Universe Designer in BO XI 3.1 and Universe Design Tool in BI 4.0.

IMPORTANT: In this method of moving objects, you always have to make sure that all necessary source objects are already available in the target environment. Only then will you be able to map all objects after 'change source'. The underlying source should be migrated prior to the report. For example, if you are using .UNV to connect to BEx query in BOXI 3.1 and wish to use the new BICS functionality in BI 4.0, you do not need to bring in the .UNV but make sure to have the BEx query + OLAP connection available so that the webi report will have all or at least most of the source objects to identify when you do a 'change source'. Wherein you find unresolved objects or '????' shown in variables, you will have to manually assign the object.