SAP Business Explorer (SAP BEx) – Maintenance and Support Policy

For all SAP Business Explorer customers that are interested in the future of BEx, here is what you need to know:

M A I N T E N A N C E

BEx 7.x

BEx 7.x continues to be supported with BW 7.50, see the additional announcements here:

• Maintenance strategy for SAP NetWeaver 7.5 fully aligned with SAP Business Suite 7. Product strategy of SAP BW/4HANA fully in line with SAP S/4HANA

• SAP BW/4HANA to extend maintenance in alignment with SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA

• SAP-Note 2609031-Sunset von BW Business Explorer (BEx)

Please note that there are no new features developed.

SAP strongly recommends to use SAP Analytics Cloud as the only enterprise end-to-end Analytics solution in the cloud. For Application Design and Custom Widgets you can use the Analytics Designer and for ad-hoc Analysis the Data Analyzer in SAC.

Please be aware that while those products have similar functionality as BEx they are not legal successors.

There is no 100% feature parity.

Where to go from BEx Analyzer (Excel) 7.x

• Most used capabilities of BEx Analyzer are available in Analysis Office 2.x (or planned)
• Conversion support of BEx workbooks to Analysis Office is available
• Consulting Service for Migration to Analysis for Office / BEx 7.0: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/07/12/automated-mass-migrationconvertion-of-bex-workbook-to-ao-2.x/
• Analysis Office can run with or without SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform (some features like scheduling, however, require BI Platform)
• You can install BEx and Analysis Office on a single PC
• Only one add-in can be active in an Excel session (in other words, either BEx or Analysis Office can be active)
• Opening a BEx workbook activates the BEx Add-In.

Links:

• Analysis Office Community
• Analysis Office Roadmap

Where to go from BEx Query Designer 7.x?

All capabilities of BEx Query Designer are available as part of the BW Modeling Tools.
BEx Query Designer can still be used with SAP BW 7.5 but is not supported with SAP BW/4HANA.
Using the BW Modeling Tools with SAP BW 7.4 or 7.5 is optional.
In SAP BW/4HANA, all queries are created and maintained using the BW Modeling Tools.

http://help.sap.com/download/netweaver/bwmt/SAP_BW_Modeling_Tools_Installation_Guide_en.pdf

When transitioning from SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA, all BW queries will be automatically migrated.

BEx 3.5

Since April 2013 BEx 3.5 is in customer-specific maintenance and not available anymore with the standard SAP GUI compilation.
For more details, see SAP Note:

1410878 – Maintenance for BW 3.5 front-end add-ons.

Please note that BEx 3.5 (design-time and runtime) is not supported for use with SAP NetWeaver BW 7.4 or higher.
For more details, see SAP Note

1932461 – SAP BW 3.5 BEx Tools / BW 3.5 Frontend Add-ons are incompatible with BW7.4.

You can find a “Cookbook for Migration to BEx 7.0” in SAP Note 1807522 – BEx 3.5 Objects Migration to BEx 7.0 but SAP recommends instead of moving to BEx 7.x to move to SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, Lumira (as of release 2.0) and Analysis Office.