We are thrilled to announce the release of the 2nd Service Package of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3!
Let us uncover what you can expect from this release, remind you why BI 4.3 is the place to go, unveil what’s coming ahead and explain how you can start your journey to the cloud with SAP BI solutions.
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 SP2 in a nutshell
This new service package is a continuation of what we started with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 and BI 4.3 SP1: continuous improvements based on what matters to you and your end users!
We deliver innovations in several areas of the product, especially in terms of productivity, ease of use, as well as an increased openness of the SAP BusinessObjects platform allowing you to envision new use cases.
Let's start with this last point. In this Service Package 2, we are pushing the integration capabilities of BOBJ. We give you the ability to access your data and files stored in your corporate Google Drive from the SAP BusinessObjects platform. Not only you can use them to create Web Intelligence documents, but also to push updated information into this drive thanks to the Scheduler functionality. And that's just the beginning, more is coming.
Likewise, it is now possible to use the data of a WebI document in the form of an OData web service, and this, with any third-party application as long as the BOBJ security is respected. Similarly, Web Intelligence can use certain types of web services as a data source.
Then, we wanted to continue to improve the usability of Web Intelligence: many cumulative improvements are provided to please your end users. To ease the consumption of your Web Intelligence reports, a new Presentation Mode (full screen) is integrated. And you can now conditionally display the reports of a WebI document based on the result set of a query, or any “management by exception” cases for example.
Finally, the last area of improvement concerns user productivity. The missing user interfaces and functionalities in BI 4.3, compared to BI 4.2, have been integrated. For example, we deliver back the interfaces to manage the complete life cycle of the “Shared Elements”, but also the consumption of your local files with the WebI Rich Client.
Additionally, in order to make your users more efficient and to offer a consistent experience: the Universe Query Panel can now access all types of data, with extended capabilities such as metadata enrichment (qualification of objects, aggregate function, and data type).
This represents a small subset of the new innovations which are part of the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 SP2. To know more and get all the details, we encourage you to have a look at the following complementary blogs:
What’s new in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Semantic Layer 4.3 SP2
What about the BI platform in the BI 4.3 SP2?
BI Platform Innovations in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 SP2 release are mainly aimed to make the BI Platform a solid base for next generation technologies and platforms. And also continuing the focus on user experience and at the same time making the platform more robust, taking these aspects into consideration, you can see this release of BI Platform as a gateway to more hybrid scenarios. Be it the introduction of OAuth SSO, OpenID Authentication or Cloud Drive (Google Drive) support, integrations for all these innovative technologies are paving the path for next generation BI Platform.
Coming to end user scenarios, in this release BI Launchpad has come up with more notable usability features like “Success or Failure indication” for scheduled instances on default home page, “Auto Refresh” in instances page, “Download button” to download the list of documents and “User Notifications” for OpenDocument, are a few of those list of usability advancements.
Apart from these innovations and improved user experience, as usual as with every release, in this release as well, BI Platform comes with support for more recent platform versions. And one more important aspect which is an implicit thing for any enterprise software is “Security”, is also been well taken care like with any other release.
The introduction of OAuth authorization support, is one another very important milestone in the history of BI Platform, as we all know, unlike any other legacy methods of authentication, Authorization is the next step in the login process, apart from identifying the user, it gives us the ability to determine what the user can do or access what kind of/which resources on the server. With BI 4.3 SP02 release, BI Platform is capable of integrating any Authorization server which supports the OAuth 2.0 protocol. This comes very handy for the BI Administrators and BI Developers, for achieving End to End SSO while creating the connection for any Datasource like Snowflake, while accessing any resource which can be accessed via the OData or to enable new age authentication using OpenID Connect.
OpenID Connect Authentication is now possible in BI Platform, which is supported on top of Enterprise Authentication. Unlike SAML authentication this OpenID Connect authentication does not require to open the Trusted Authentication mode, and also all the configuration is at the backend as it uses the configuration defined at Authorization Server level. All it needs is enabling at “Authorization Server” configuration level, choosing which authorization server configuration need to serve for OpenID login requests and finally decide to enable at desired web application with just two flags in the respective properties file. And of course the user with the proper email-id along with Enterprise alias should pre-exist in the BI platform for a successful OpenID connect login. Currently it is supported only for “BI Launchpad” and “OpenDocument” applications.
In recent days, Cloud Drive support is something customers are eagerly waiting for, which is very evident in the SAP BusinessObjects community, with no further delay with BI 4.3 SP02 release, BI Platform comes with support of one such platform, that is “Google Drive”. Thanks to Authorization Server(OAuth) support, like in the case of OpenID Connect, for Google Drive Support also OAuth configuration is the backbone. Having said that, BI Users will be able to make use any folder existing on Google Drive, as destination for their scheduled instances. This also with specific destination security right, so that BI Administrators can manage the intended group of users which can use this new destination. As mentioned above, there can be more and more such cloud drive platforms can be part of the BI Platform support, based on the customer need.
What's new in SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.3 SP2
What's new in Crystal Reports 4.3 SP2
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 SP2 and Need4viz
We are also delighted to propose you an opportunity developed with our partner Need4viz.
Indeed, from this SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 SP2, you can benefit, free of charge, from 7 graphic components of the catalog of Need4viz.
This Freemium offering will begin with the release of SAP BOBJ BI 4.3 SP2 and will last at least until December 2023.
The advantage of this freemium offer, coupled with Web Intelligence, is that it transforms WebI into an Ad-Hoc Query - interactive reporting and dashboarding - data visualization and data exploration tool.
No need to use anything else: you will be able to respond to any BI use cases of your end-users. And that with your favorite reporting tool, for an immediate return on investment.
To register to the Freemium offer, it's here
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 is the place to go
We warmly encourage you to leverage this release to adopt BI 4.3, like the 1000+ customers already did it for a productive usage.
The upgrade from previous versions is straightforward, it can be considered like an update, and with SP2, you benefit from the best feature set among all available versions.
Last but not least, operating the latest version of our solutions guarantees the best support level we can offer with up-to-date 3rd party components, security and certification for the latest connectivities and platform versions.
The road ahead
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 SP2 is an important milestone in our journey, but certainly not the end of the road as we still have plenty of ideas to further improve our solution and embrace your future use cases.
Key investment areas going forward are to continue integrating SAP BusinessObjects into the new world of the cloud platforms (MS Drive/Sharepoint, cloud databases), deliver greater Data Management capabilities in Web Intelligence (data transformation and data synchronization), and better usability by focusing on your most pressing enhancement requests.
Also, don’t miss to regularly check the SAP BusinessObjects addendum to Statement of Direction where we disclose how we foresee the evolution of BusinessObjects portfolio and detail our investment areas.
We know that many companies are moving all or part of their BI landscape to the cloud, and we are committed to supporting you during this journey.
Several options are available, including our pure SaaS solution, SAP Analytics cloud, and a managed cloud version of SAP BusinessObjects: SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise managed cloud edition.
And of course, you can use a combination of the different solutions and choose the pace at which you move your workflows to the cloud. One last comment here: in any case, you always have the choice to keep your data on premise since we offer live connectivity from all our BI solutions to your favorite data sources.
We value your feedback
Please, let us know what you think and don’t hesitate to ask any questions or share any feedbacks.
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