BI4.2 Managing Platform Improvements ASUG Webcast Q&A

[TammyPowlas]

NOTICE: All forward looking statements made by SAP are subject to change

Thanks to SAP's Maheshwar Singh, we had an active question and answer on yesterday's ASUG webcast

Question & Answer

Q: How often are the Developer teams using SAP Idea Place to look at Customer Requests and Votes..?

A: Maheshwar does that quite frequently

Q: Support for MS-OFFICE 2016 will be available soon..?

A: Evaluate that - PAM document will be updated when certified.

Q: Design Studio Audit data is not like the data captured for Webi and Crystal, will that be enhanced?

A: Yes, that is true, idea is to improve all auditing going forward including Design Studio

Q: Writing alerts using the expression language in CMC Monitoring is extremely cumbersome just to check if a system is online/offline ; and the interface is complex; any change this will be simplified?

A: Need to rethink; find it complex; rather do administrative type monitoring that easy to use - evaluating a proposal; perhaps include in the influence council

Q: Will Audit data be enhanced to capture meaningful data for duration_ms (to capture more of the components duration) and for Design Studio and other addins?

A: For Design Studio, yes begin capturing - next version of Analysis Office will be audited. Lumira, no, but next version of Lumira should support auditing.

Q: Will you be providing any standard content (universes, canned reports etc) for BusinessObjects auditing? Similar to BW Statistics

A:  See this: Unlock the Auditing database with a new Universe and Web Intelligence Documents for BI4.1/BI4.2

Q: Can you share a link where we can participate in influence council for this aspect? (admin cockpit, etc.)

A: CEI is now closed; please consider joining -  POST data or see https://influence.sap.com/BusinessObjectsBIPlatform2016

Q: We currently have BI41 with Design Studio 1.6, after the upgrade to BI4.2 do we need to reinstall DS1.6 for 4.2?

A: Looking at introducing new license key for 4.2 if you go with that route may need to reinstall otherwise no impact - depends on proposal

Q: Has a release date for 4.2 been announced yet?

A: Looking at tentative timeline of end of Q1 or early Q2 - need to meet KPI's for rampup

Q: Admin cockpit has longest running reports or jobs? If either...can you drill down to details to where it is taking the most time?

A: Not at this time. Trying to see if case log files - seeing if feasible.

Q: Is Administrators Cockpit configurable? - Where are RunTime stats coming from - auditdb ? cmsdb?

A: Not in 4.2; doing some ideation with customers to find out what would like to configuration

Q: Although the recycle bin is in the CMC does it catch documents that are deleted by Launchpad users?

A: Yes, any content that is part of the public folder is caught by recycle bin - plan to include recycle bin for launchpad users

Q: Will there be any enhancements for Design Studio on BI platform, especially in the area of bookmark administration & folders?

A: BI platform is choice for Design Studio going forward. Commentary in future coming. Bookmark admin - some discussions happening; not closed

Q: Will the new BI platform customer connection program influence BI4.3? Will there be a 4.3? https://influence.sap.com/BusinessObjectsBIPlatform2016

A: Good question - Customer Connection - not 4.3 really, could influence SP for 4.2. First SP's may include customer connect request or SP after. There will likely be a 4.3 but still don't have 4.2 out the door. Under discussion

Q: Does Lumira for BI platform work with BI4.2 or is it dependent on a certain platform?

A: The current version 1.29 w/ SP3 now supports BI 4.2

Q: When will all the "hidden" FLASH Browser Dependencies in CMC and Launchpad be REMOVED from those interfaces..?

A: 4.2 remove flash dependencies from Promotion Manager; now HTML5. Flash today continues to exist in CMC for monitoring. BI Workspace has 1 component for Flash. Crystal Reports has flash in the prompts page. Need to remove.

Related:

The SAP User Group in France shared this with ASUG yesterday:

A new focus topic (Customer Connection) BI Platform will begin the January 8.

https://influence.sap.com/BusinessObjectsBIPlatform2016