SAP BI 4.2 – BI Platform New Features

Hello Everyone,

Here I would like to highlight some of the new features available with BI 4.2 from the Platform perspective. Some of you would have already aware of these features, but here I want to list it for the newbies.

1. User Notifications:

This is the feature which helps administrator to broadcast information to users. Consider the case where the administrator of BO system wants to send a message to all/any particular users. This can be achieved through User Notifications from CMC. The administrator can specify the timeline for the notification to be visible. The notification can also be sent as an Email which is mapped to the user.

How to create Notifications:

Go to BO CMC->Events->User Notifications

Specify the timeline for the notification to be visible and enter the Title and Description:

Manage Subscribers:

Here the subscribers can be users or groups

How to view the Notifications:

Once the user log into BI Launchpad, the notification would be highlighted and also available under My Alerts section. By clicking “See More” the details can be seen

2. Commentary:

This service is provided by platform for all BI Clients. The comments are stored in Audit DB by default but it’s customizable

Where to Customize:

Go to BO CMC->Applications->BI Commentary Application->Properties

The comments are managed by rights, and the authorizations on commenting to be defined on individual folder or object level

Eg: If I want to enable rights for the documents under folder say “Murali_Folder”, go to its User Security and select the user, assign the rights

Adding/Managing comments are already discussed in http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-67437 which you can refer.

3. Recycle Bin:

This feature enables the user to restore accidentally deleted content. It supports only Public Folders and Content.

Where to Enable:

Go to BO CMC->Applications->Recycle Bin Application

The threshold (No of days) can be set and once the threshold reaches the files will be removed from Recycle Bin

Some of the deletes files available in Recycle Bin

4. Administrator Cockpit:

If the administrator want to get a fast insight about the BO systems, he can access this feature, which gives, simplified drillable visual page with key information like list of Servers/status, Jobs, etc and specific actions are possible

5. Promotion Manager:

With BI 4.2, the administrator can do a selective retrieval of objects from LCMBIAR file. New job will be initiated based on the selection made. This would be helpful when the LCMBIAR file contains more no. of objects and the administrator want to promote only lesser objects.

Also the admin can utilize connection overrides while promoting content

6. Rest API:

These APIs would help

• For User Management (Add/Create/Modify)
• Uploading/Downloading documents to/from Platform

7. Upgrade Manager:

During the upgrade,

• the administrator can specify the Log Level
• also he can control the content(Objects) while upgrading

8. Audit:

In BI 4.2, the scalability of Auditing has been improved, which means when more events logged, the repository can be accessed by more users. There will not be any performance bottlenecks w.r.t Auditing.

Please note that this is in the Beta release and it may change in the GA release without prior notice.

Thanks for reading and hope this helps you.

Regards,

Murali