As we at SAP continue to affirm our commitment to best-in-class analytics solutions, we recognize the need to embrace multiple systems, platforms, and experiences, with the equally important need to simplify the solutions that enable us to do so. With this in mind, we have received valuable feedback for improvement from our customers, partners, and the BI community in general regarding SAP Lumira Server for HANA (LS4H) and SAP Lumira Cloud. Based on this feedback, we have updated Lumira’s on-premise server architecture to support several key objectives that include support for relational and multi-dimensional data, business analyst and authored dashboard workflows support, and enterprise deployments of Trusted Data Discovery, while at the same time continuing to use SAP HANA as an in-memory data platform.
For cloud, we are embarking on a new cloud native analytics solution called SAP Cloud for Analytics that will combine the capabilities of data discovery, planning and predictive within a single cloud platform and will allow for embedded workflows within other applications. Some of these new capabilities can already be experienced in SAP Cloud for Planning. More capabilities are planned and will be revealed at SAP TechEd Las Vegas as well as online.
The next step that SAP has taken along this path of flexibility and simplification for Lumira is the introduction of SAP Lumira Server for BI Platform (LS4BIP). With Lumira now coexisting with enterprise BI content on the BI Platform, business users are able to open, interact with, edit, refresh and save Lumira documents through their browser in the BI Launchpad. End users no longer need to access different servers for agile visualization (Lumira) and enterprise BI (Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports and Design Studio). This integration enables Trusted Data Discovery, allowing IT to govern Lumira with an enterprise BI platform, reducing administrative overhead associated with managing multiple environments and allowing content and user security to all be maintained through the CMC.
Customers with HANA can continue to leverage HANA’s integration with LS4BIP to obtain high-speed analytical results off of large enterprise data. The integration of Lumira into the BI platform effectively creates a single, trusted infrastructure within which business users and IT can share a common experience for enterprise BI & Trusted Data Discovery.
With Lumira integrated in the BI Platform, we can now add refreshable data support for Universes, BEx queries and Big Data sources to the already familiar online HANA data. Business users and analysts can acquire and prepare data through their Lumira Desktop and save it to LS4BIP from their browser. Data acquisition and preparation via the browser is planned for future releases, and if you have enabled auditing in your BI environment, Lumira can now take advantage of this.
With the 1.28 release of Lumira, we have discontinued future updates to LS4H and Lumira Cloud. Your existing Lumira Desktop 1.28 will continue to work with both LS4H and Lumira Cloud until their end of maintenance which is planned for September 30, 2016. For existing Lumira Cloud users that would like to showcase their latest Lumira version content in the cloud, we have made a hosted instance of LS4BIP available. If you wish to trial LS4BIP through this hosted instance, please contact your account executive for more information on how to get an account created.
For current LS4H deployments, the switch is simple: any content designed with Lumira Desktop and published to LS4H can be republished to LS4BIP.
For LS4H customers, the following section outlines some of the steps that are required to migrate from LS4H to LS4BIP:
1. Prepare your BI Platform:
a. If installed, uninstall LIMA (the old Lumira In-Memory Add-on that is now wholly replaced by LS4BIP). Check out this blog
for additional information regarding the differences between LS4BIP and LIMA.
b. Educate & Enable Users: Inform your business users about the change in server names, authentication methods, and publishing and saving workflows to LS4BIP. There is no need to do additional training regarding the Lumira Desktop tool as the changes are made to the workflow configurations and not the tool itself.
2. Migration:
a. Lumira Content Migration: There are two ways of creating Lumira stories within LS4H: one using Lumira Desktop and the other through the “Lumira Launchpad”. Content created using Lumira Launchpad of LS4H cannot be saved or republished to the BI Launchpad of LS4BIP and must be recreated from within either LS4BIP or Lumira Desktop. In contrast, if a story was created using Lumira Desktop, the content can be re-saved to LS4BIP. This process must be completed for all documents. Additionally, you must ensure that users have the rights to save Lumira documents to LS4BIP (either to the public folder or to their favourites, depending on the business needs).
b. Report Security & Authorization: Within the BI Platform, you may need to add users to the groups and provide application level access in order to let your users view/edit Lumira documents. Create a sample user and test your security setup before rolling out the change in large scale. There is no need to create new roles on HANA, and you can use your existing data security model (analytic priveleges) to secure your report data. With Lumira 1.28 you can setup SSO using SAML between the BI Platform and HANA. If you are new to the SAP BI Platform, check the BI Platform security guide for more details.
c. Data security can be managed either at the data source level or in Universes. Where HANA is the data source, you can use the data security that you have configured there.
3. Post Migration:
a. Remove access to the old server: Once all the content has been migrated to LS4BIP, ensure that access to LS4H is disabled (or the server is decommissioned) as users should not be able to publish documents to the old server.
b. Keep a watch on the BI Platform: Plan on revisiting your sizing periodically so that your server doesn’t become overburdened by users creating new content and growing the total volume of documents. If unchecked, this can lead to degradation in performance and can affect the overall user experience. In short, ensure that the platform is monitored regularly and actions are taken proactively rather than reactively.
c. Ensure proper workflow: If you prefer not to deploy Lumira Desktop to a large user base, your IT team can create a standardized Lumira document and save it to BI Platform for users to edit and create new stories using their browser. Note that data preparation capabilities are not yet available for LS4BIP. Data acquisition and preparation via the browser is planned for future releases.
While you may continue to use LS4H, as of Lumira 1.23 there are new features in Lumira Desktop and LS4BIP that have not been added and will not be supported with LS4H and Lumira Cloud. For example, BW mashups from BEx queries, scheduling, expressions, data blending, forecasting, LCM, auditing, monitoring, (the full list can be found at the bottom of this page) are only available with LS4BIP. Content created in Lumira Desktop 1.28 and below using these features, and any content created in Lumira Desktop 1.29 and above, will not be supported with LS4H or Lumira Cloud. If you wish to trial these features before upgrading to a new version of Lumira Desktop, you may deploy two editions of Lumira Desktop on one workstation by following the steps outlined in this blog post.
We have listened very closely to your feedback on how we can improve your experience with Lumira for Trusted Data Discovery and we are confident that you will find LS4BIP meets the majority of those improvement requests. Business users will now be able to unleash their creative DataGenius and create visualizations and stories directly on LS4BIP. We have many more ways that we are looking to continue to improve your experience with Lumira and we encourage you to continue to submit your ideas on how we can further do so in our Idea Place category for SAP Lumira.
Feature comparison of Lumira Server for BI Platform and Lumira Server for HANA
O = supported X = unsupported
| LS4BIP | LS4H |
Agility | Prepare Room | * | X |
Visualization Room | O | O |
Blending: offline sources | O | X |
Blending: HANA online | O | X |
Blending: intersect/except# | O | X |
Forecasting/Linear Regression | O | X |
Export Records from viz or data point selection# | O | X |
Enhancements to Expressions: # | O | X |
o Reset Running Totals # | O | X |
o Difference From # | O | X |
o Reset Percent Of # | O | X |
o Reset Moving Average # | O | X |
Calendar week support in time hierarchies# | O | X |
Create, edit and delete 'global' filters | O | X |
Copy visualization to clipboard # | O | X |
Set Display Formatting for measures and dimensions | O | X |
Compose Room | O | O |
Data Source | FHSQL | O 1 | X |
CSV, XLS and TXT | O | O |
Universe | O 2 | X |
HANA Online | O 3 | O |
HANA Acquisition | O 4 | X |
HANA Multi-database Container | * | X |
BW Acquisition (BEx queries) | O 5 | X |
Platform | Refresh On Open | * | O |
Scheduling | O 6 | X |
Publication | * | X |
Share | O | O |
Desktop Governance | O | X |
Auditing | O | X |
Data Quality and Lineage | * | X |
Commentary | O 7 | X |
Life Cycle Management | O 8 | X |
SSO: Windows AD | O | X |
SSO: HANA SAML | O | O |
SSO: SAP BW STS | O 9 | X |
Categorization | O | O (FIORI) |
URL Sharing / Embedding / Bookmark | * | O (FIORI) |
Mobile | Mobile BI | * | O (Online) |
Notification | * | X |
SDK | Open Document | * | X |
Visualization Extensions | * | O |
Data Access Extensions | O 10 | X |
* Planned innovation where feature is planned for future release. Subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any for any reason without notice.
# Feature also available in Compose Room
1. Supported sources for server side refresh as of 1.28 include SQL 2008/12/14, Oracle 11g and Generic JDBC. More are planned
2. Server side refresh for .unx only
3. Supported with SAP HANA Revision 82, 83, 84, 85, 96, 97
4. Supported with SAP HANA Revision 82
5. Supported with SAP BW 7.x
6. Documents based on .unx Query Panel, XLS/CSV/TXT and SAP BW only as of 1.28. More are planned
7. Discussion thread capability inherited from the BI Platform. Annotations are a planned innovation
8. Requires BI 4.1 SP06+
9. Supported only for Documents created based on Managed connections (OLAP Connections in CMC)
10. Universe Query Panel Data Access Extension for .unx and Download from SAP Business Warehouse for SAP BW only. More are planned
