David Taylors' Business Intelligence Blog

Want to find out what all the buzz is about?

Want to take your education about HANA to the next level?

SAP has put together an aggregated site which brings together all the current content available on HANA.  The website is called:  Experience SAP HANA

http://www.experiencesaphana.com/

It does require you to register but I found there really was a lot of content to look through and it is well worth it.  There are still lots of videos and customer presentations, but it’s the best one-stop shop to go and learn everything there is about HANA.

I especially liked the »Implement« section, where you can learn about technical details like SQL Script, HANA Backup & Recovery, HANA Modeller, Security, SLT Configuration, etc.  If you want to know it, it’s probably here.

Enjoy!

«Good BI»

If you’ve been using Xcelsius very long then you’ve probably experienced the heartache of having users download the latest version of flash and having it break their Xcelsius dashboards.  It doesn’t happen very often, but once and a while, Adobe releases a version of flash player that is utterly incompatible with Xcelsius… and when that day comes you’ll be glad you found this blog post!

Rolling Back Flash

Flash is a funny animal.  Not only does Adobe install the flash player on your computer but it also installs flash within your IE browser.  Therefore the first challenge is uninstalling flash and here’s how to do it.

Uninstall Flash

This isn’t as easy as you might think.  A simple Windows Uninstall will not work.

1. Download the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller: uninstall_flash_player.exe (229 KB).
   (Alternatively you may download it from my local site here)
2. Save the uninstaller file, choosing a location where you can find it–your Windows Desktop, for example.
3. Exit all applications. Check the taskbar and the system tray to make sure that no user applications are running. NO MS OFFICE APPS.  For example, if you see icons for browsers or instant messaging (IM) clients such as AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, right-click the icon and select either Close or Exit. The following image shows how to close the Yahoo! Messenger client after right-clicking its icon in the Windows system tray:

4. Run the uninstaller. If you see the message ”Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?,” click Yes.
5. Go into the control panel and make sure “Flash Player” is not available.

After The Uninstall

Check your version:  http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

It should indicate to you that flash is NOT installed.

Installing a Legacy Flash Verison

All the old versions are located here:  http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html

I downloaded and tested the following procedures using Flashplayer10_1r102_64_winax.zip

1. Make sure all applications are still closed.
2. Unzip Flashplayer10_1r102_64_winax.zip (This is an “active” version of Flash for Internet Explorer which you will need)
3. Run it the installer.
4. Go to:  http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/  and verify it’s working…

Finito

Now’s there’s just one final tip to consider.

Turning off Auto Updates

You might want to turn off automatic updates of your flash player.  This article explains how:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/713/a7138026.html

«Good BI»

If you’re like the other thousands of SAP BusinessObjects customers, you would love to move your Xcelsius dashboards to the iPad.  Right?

The problem is flash.  Steve Jobs hates flash and steadfastly refuses to support flash on the iPad.  Even on tablet devices that do support flash such as the Samsung Galaxy, some people complain that flash applications are too sluggish.

So What’s the Solution?

I discovered a very special app on iTunes called iSwifter .  iSwifter allows flash to run on the iPad… so to speak.  Actually flash does not run on the device at all but it is streamed to the tablet.  I have visions of thousands of computers with Internet Explorer sessions running.

Within a few minutes and $4.99 later, I was up and running.  I was able to connect to an instance of SAP BusinessObjects that was accessible over the Internet.  There are however multiple problems with this app.  I found that iSwifter:

• Only connects to publicly available websites.  The URL you are connecting to must be a publicly accessible site
• Requires a WiFi connection
• Isn’t completely secure.  Your connection with the iSwifter server doesn’t appear to be secure.

Apparently there is a large demand for this type of technology because the company recently reported revenue to exceed $10M and they have moved from a one-time fee to a monthly subscription service.

Enter Exxova

Exxova is a subsidiary of Bartronics India Ltd.  Their US Headquarters is located in Alpharetta, GA and Mark Hillam, who used to work at BusinessObjects, is the president of their BI practice.  I saw Mark at Sapphire after his team made quite a splash showing Xcelsius dashboards on the iPad using their app MyBI.  More recently Mark invited me to their offices to spend more time with the solution and I was very impressed.  Although it is still relatively early days for this solution, it holds a lot of promise.
Today with Exxova,  you can deploy ALL your existing BI content to the iPad without any modifications.

For more videos click go here:  http://www.youtube.com/user/ExxovaWorldwideCorp

I recommend that you download it and play around with it.  It’s free.

There are several really nice features.   I found that MyBI:

• Can be implemented within your corporate firewall.
• Does NOT requires a WiFi connection (although 3G is pretty slow).
• Provides special gestures to simulate right-click, scroll, pan, zoom in and out.

Here are some screenshots from MyBI

Exxova Help Screen

Exxova Home Screen

Xcelsius Dashboard

WebIntelligence on the iPad

What Approach Will Your Company Take?

We seem to be at one of those paradigm shifts where organizations need to make a decision.  There is no doubt that companies are adopting the iPad device in ever growing numbers.  The $million$ dollar question is:

Do we create custom interfaces for the iPad or simply make our existing content available there?

Are you prepared to invest heavily in the iPad and build your own apps or purchase additional apps that require additional development and redesign efforts  or are you going to wait and see how the tablet market plays out.  The iPad is the predominate player today, but who’s to say that this dominance will remain?  And besides, the iOS platform only supports Apple devices.  Oh what I would give for a crystal ball.

The choice is yours, but today, I see MyBI from Exxova as a good alternative to redevelopment.  (and just in case you are curious — no, I did not get paid to write this article nor have I ever received any compensation from Exxova, but I’ve seen the solution, played with it and think that it’s worth considering.)

I am curious to hear from you.  What do you think?  Is a custom iPad interface worth the redevelopment?

«Good BI»

So has everyone see the new interface for Crystal Reports?  If not, you’re missing out.  SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 includes a brand new version of Crystal Reports called, Crystal Reports for Enterprise.  This version of Crystal is new in BusinessObjects v4.0 introduces the new tabbed user interface which has been rolled out to all the client tools.

Crystal Reports 2011 and Crystal Reports for Enterprise are both available in BusinessObjects v4.0.

You may be asking:  What is the difference between Crystal Reports 2011 and Crystal Reports for Enterprise?  That’s a great question.

In short, Crystal Reports 2011 is the legacy Crystal Reports 2008 with a few new features.  Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the future of Crystal Reports… and here’ s why it makes sense to have two versions.

The Crystal Reports development team wanted to make sure there was absolutely zero disruption to the use of existing Crystal Reports.   Customers are always #1.  It’s all about allowing customers customers and partners to continue to leverage their Crystal Reports investments, while at the same time laying out a future direction for the product.   Those 1B+ Crystal Reports need to keep running.

The new, future direction means delivering the best possible connectivity to the new semantic layer in SAP BusinessObjects v4.0, together will a new charting engine and much, much more.  As a result, they also released the distinct, next generation version of Crystal Reports called, Crystal Reports for Enterprise.

Version Comparison

Crystal Reports 2011 – All legacy Crystal reports 2008 functionality with read-only report format (.rptr), export to Excel workbook data only (.xlsx), integration with Visual Studio 2010 and integration for WPF apps.

Crystal Reports for Enterprise – Next generation Crystal Reports Designer with streamlined user interface, new charting engine, updated report design, connectivity to the new semantic layer (unx), platform driven alerts and 64-bit processing on the server (although the designer is still native 32-bit).

NOTE:  For all new features please see the
release notes.

Result – This gives customers the best of both worlds.  Both versions of Crystal Reports can run side-by-side on the same desktop client.  The associated processing servers and job servers can also run side-by-side on the same server.  Zero disruptions – tons of new capabilities.

Configuring Crystal Report for Enterprise

The biggest challenge I ran into when first using Crystal Reports for Enterprise was getting connected to my CMS.  I had no idea how to configure my server connections.

1.  When you start Crystal Reports for Enterprise you will see this:

2.  Next you will need to connect to your BusinessObjects Enterprise repository (to access the semantic layer).  Choose File -> Log On to SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise

3.  You can save connections to multiple repositories.  Lets configure the first server connection by clicking on the box to the right of the Server Connections field.

4.  Enter in the following fields.  Note that the Server Context must be entered as /dswsbobje.  After entering the fields, make sure you can test the connection.

If you have a proxy server in play, make sure that this is configured correctly in Internet Explorer.  Crystal Reports for Enterprise will leverage this configuration when attempting to talk to the server.

5.  After entering the fields you should see an entry similar to the following screen:

Click to see a full size view

6.  You should now be able to connect to your repository and begin building content off any of the new UNX semantic layer definitions you have created.  Make sure and play with the new charting engine and report layout controls.  See how much easier it is to drag, drop and align fields onto the workspace.

Future of Two Crystal Reports Versions

More good news.  Within a relatively short time frame, the Crystal Reports teams plans to bring all the capabilities on the classic Crystal Reports 2008/2011 version into Crystal Reports for Enterprise.  So I don’t expect we will have two versions of Crystal Reports for very long.  Here are a list of some of the things that are NOT in the initial release of Crystal Reports for Enterprise v4.0:

• No direct data support (ODBC/JDBC, etc)
• No direct OLAP support (other than BEx Queries)
• No Live Office support
• No Enterprise Search
• API/SDK Gaps

These are all the major things that will need to be added before Crystal Reports for Enterprise becoming the only version of Crystal Reports in the BusinessObjects Suite.

P.S.  I love the new abbreviation for Crystal Reports for Enterprise, it’s cr4e.   Very Cute.

«Good BI»

Are you wondering when SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 is going GA?  So does Mico Yuk.   Will it be August 31st?  Maybe.  That’s the date currently advertised on Service Marketplace.

SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 GA Date

Mico Yuk recently did an interview with Steve Lucas where she was able to get the answers to 4 burning SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 questions.  If you’ve not read it, then do.  you can find it here: http://bit.ly/nBxZU3

SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 went into ramp-up in September 2010 and although I think SAP was pretty clear that the ramp-up would last 6-8 months, that timeframe has come and gone.  It is true that there was an early teaser video that announced SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 coming in Q4 2010.    You can watch it below:

Have You Downloaded v4.0?

If you’ve not taken the chance to download SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 and begin to play with it you should!  Approximately two months ago, SAP opened up access to the software beyond the ramp-up program and anyone who is interested can download it from Service Marketplace…  There are a lot of new features in this release.

SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 introduces:

• New multi-source Semantic Layer
• New Charting and Graphing for all products
• New Crystal Reports for Enterprise
• Tons of new WebIntelligence features
• Revamped OLAP Client for the Web
• New Xcelsius Direct Binding to the Semantic Layer (no more Excel or QaaWS required)

I know the release is getting close because I’ve seen significant strides around quality.  The latest pre-release version of SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 is SP02, Patch 4.  (SP = Support Pack).

Although early on in my testing I found a number of problems – especially with WebIntelligence,  the number of issues I’ve has dropped dramatically as development has continued to roll out new fix packs on an regular basis.

Coming Soon

So, it’s pretty clear.  SAP BusinessObjects v4.0 IS coming soon…

«Good BI»

First of all my apologies for a long hiatus from blogging.  I had expected to be blogging a lot about BusinessObjects v4.0, but with all the new innovation around HANA, Mobility and a little summer vacation thrown it, I’ve let things pile up a bit.

Can’t Find My SAP Landscape in Crystal

Have you ever added access to an SAP system and not been able to find it when you started Crystal Reports?  Don’t worry, you’re not alone!

Here is a sample of landscapes that appears in my SAP GUI Interface.  My problem is that I added DH3 but it does not appear in Crystal Reports:

Solution

Crystal Reports 2008 requires you to put your latest saplogon.ini into the C:Windows directory of your local system.  The problem is, where does SAP GUI store the saplogon.ini so I can copy it over?

This answer changes depending on what operating system you are using.  In the past SAP stored the file in C:Windows, which is why Crystal looks for it there, but as operating systems have changed, so has SAP’s implementation of SAPGUI.  I recently moved to Windows 7 and SAP GUI 720 was having problems finding my saplogon.ini file.

Here is what I’ve seen:

Windows XP – C:Windowssaplogon.ini
Windows Vista – C:users<user profile>AppDataLocalVirtual StoreWindowssaplogon.ini
Windows 7 -   C:Users<yourname>AppDataRoamingSAPCommonsaplogon.ini

NOTE:  You can store your saplogon.ini in any directory on your
machine. The catch is that you have to set the environment variable
SAPLOGON_INI_FILE to point to the saplogon.ini that you want to use.
I would advise setting this variable at the system level rather
than at the user level if there are multiple users on the machine.

Once you manually copy this saplogon.ini file into your C:Windows directory, you will be able to see all the same SAP landscapes in Crystal Reports that you see in your SAP GUI.

Now you can access all your SAP landscape from Crystal Reports.

«Good BI»

Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to display a date on a report but the date was in date/time format?

I run into this all the time when dealing with detailed data from transactions with date time stamps.

The best way I’ve found to do it is by converting the value from DateTime to Text and back to Date.

Convert Text to Date

Believe it or not, it’s not too bad after you figure it out.  It did take me a few tries so I thought I’d share my solution with you.

=ToDate(Left(UserResponse("As Of Date");
Pos(UserResponse("As Of Date");" ")-1);"M/d/yyyy")

Let’s break it down so we can understand the individual components.

In this case, the field I am formatting is a date/time prompt and I will reference it by the name “As Of Date”.

I will need to perform 3 steps in able to convert it:

1. Use the Pos function and find the space between the date & time, e.g. 1/1/2011 15:03:03 returns the position value of 9.
2. Next use the Left function and grab everything to the left of the space – 1.  e.g. 1/1/2011 15:03:03 returns the text “1/1/2011″.
3. ToDate now takes the date text and converts it to a date.  e.g. 1/1/2011 becomes a date type field 2011-01-01

Display As Text

Optionally now that I have the value in a date-field format, I can now convert it back to a formatted date using the FormatDate function.

=FormatDate(ToDate(Left(UserResponse("As Of Date");
Pos(UserResponse("As Of Date");" ")-1);"M/d/yyyy");"yyyy-MM")

What about you?

What’s your favorite WebI syntax for converting data types in WebI?

Do you have any conversions that are giving you trouble?

«Good BI»

Did you ever read Sherlock Holmes when you were a kid?

…or maybe CSI:Miami is more your style.

Sometimes as I work with software I find a mystery.  A mystery so unusual that I have to go searching for the answer.  At the beginning, I always assume that I know what the outcome will be, but on more than one occasion I’ve been hit by a twist at the end.

Today, my mystery surrounds Visual Studio .NET and the SDKs from BusinessObjects.

The Mystery

One of the ideas I have been promoting for a very, very long time was the idea that organizations should offload all their reporting to an Enterprise Reporting environment like BusinessObjects Enterprise and allow their .NET developers to do the real work of building complex, custom applications.  This is the best way to allow your .NET applications to scale and do what they are good at (building applications), while your reporting environment can scale and do what it’s good at (delivering insightful, actionable reports).

Earlier this week however, my customer intrigued me with a question:

“When we moved to the new release of Visual Studio, we found ourselves running into compatibility issues with the BusinessObjects XIr2 SDK.  Will we have the same compatibility issues with Visual Studio and  XI 3.1?”

My Surprise

As I dug a little deeper I discovered that this customer has significantly curtailed their use of the BusinessObjects SDKs because they wanted to use Visual Studio 2008 and BusinessObjects XIr2 didn’t support Visual Studio 2008.  They moved to Visual Studio 2008 but were only using opendocument to link to new report (instead of using the embedded Crystal Report Viewer) and they had built a custom Web Service to enable scheduling of reports (instead of using the Platform SDK).

Although I am not a developer, I was somewhat surprised at this problem.  I hadn’t done any SDK work since using the COM SDK in Visual Basic 6.  Even then I was just building a few examples.  Nothing big.  All a developer needed to do was point the Studio to the appropriate BusinessObjects Enterprise DLLs and he was off and running.  So what’s the problem?  I needed to investigate.

Was there really an incompatibility or had they missed something?

The Investigation

I started checking the forums and sending out emails to the top tier folks to see what they could tell me and the answer I got back was a complete twist from what I had expected.

First of all, there is a big difference between leveraging Crystal Reports embedded within a .NET application to provide reporting and using our .NET SDK to help provide a scalable, enterprise class reporting for your .NET applications.  I explain the difference in significant detail here:
http://neverknewthat.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/crystal-reports-embedded/

Embedded Crystal Reports

For embedded reporting, customers typically would get a free version of Crystal Reports embedded within the Studio IDE.  This version would have a lot of functionality, but the developer could always get even more features, if he paid more $money and purchased the standalone version of Crystal Reports.

NOTE:  These stand-alone versions allowed users to create .rpt files
outside of Visual Studio.  It also meant that less technical users
could build reports for the .NET applications.

It’s important to understand whether or not you are using the ‘embedded’ version of Crystal Reports.  If you are doing all your report design from within Visual Studio only, then you are using the embedded report designer.  By definition the embedded report designer is always compatible with the version of Visual Studio it was shipped with.

Starting with Visual Studio 2010, Crystal Reports is no longer included “in the box”, however it is still available as a free download.  Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 supports Visual Studio 2010 only and Microsoft framework 2.0 and higher- Link to PAR

For the best, most up-to-date information about Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 go to:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/crystalreports-dotnet

So to be clear, in order to get support for Visual Studio 2010, you need to download Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010.  This is the embedded version of Crystal Reports which works with Visual Studio 2010.

Stand-alone Crystal Reports

So now what about those customers who decided to purchase the stand-alone version of Crystal Reports.  What versions of Visual Studio is their Crystal Reports compatible with?

The stand-alone version definitely provides you more functionality.  It allows someone else to create a standalone .rpt file.  The developer can then include the report in his Visual Studio project.  However, not every version of Crystal Reports is compatible with every version of Visual Studio.  You need to make sure that these stand-alone versions are going to be compatible with the report rendering engine that is embedded within Visual Studio.  This rendering engine is what converts the .rpt file to .html during runtime.

Each version of Crystal Reports has an associated supported platforms document or PAR/PAM.

Here is another great matrix you should reference:
https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Which+Crystal+Reports+assembly+versions+are+supported+in+which+versions+of+Visual+Studio+.NET

NOTE: Crystal Reports 2011 is currently in ramp up and does not yet support
Visual Studio 2010 or the 4.0 Framework.

Crystal Reports & BusinessObjects Enterprise

So this brings me to the situation my customer was asking about.

What if we are a customer who has implemented BusinessObjects Enterprise XI and all the reports are stored within the BusinessObjects Repository?  What support do we have from a Microsoft Visual Studio perspective?

In this situation I initially was unable to get the same clarity I did in the previous two scenarios.  There is no reference to Visual Studio within the BusinessObjects SDK PAR documentation that I could find.  In addition, if you are only using the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDK, then surely Visual Studio would be upward compatible.

As I checked the BOB forums, I did find that some folks had run into problems.

Word of Wisdom:  Do not upgrade to a new version of Visual Studio until you are sure that the compatible SDKs are available from SAP.

• Visual Studio 2008 is NOT compatible with Crystal Reports XIr2
• Here another one – Crystal Report 11 R2 Deployment Visual Studio 2008 .NET 3.5

Let me say that again.  You should ASSUME that Crystal Reports is NOT compatible with new versions of Visual Studio.  This is due to the fact that there are Crystal Reports controls which are part of the Visual Studio IDE.  Therefore be very careful and always read the PAR.  Repeat:  Always read the PAR.

So, it’s pretty clear when it comes to Crystal Reports, but what about the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDKs alone?

You will notice that there is no mention of Visual Studio in the BusinessObjects Enterprise PAR documents.  This is because there are no embedded BusinessObjects Enterprise components in the Visual Studio IDE as there are for Crystal Reports.  Because of this looser form of integration between .NET and the Enterprise SDK, it is possible to support more variations of .NET and Framework versions.

NOTE:  Know that when you install the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDK for .NET,
the installer installs a new Crystal Viewer SDK.

For BOE XI 3.1 Platform PAR, it shows that .NET Framework 3.5 is supported, and not 4.0.   NOTE that it is shipped with the Visual Studio 2008 redistributable package, therefore use Visual Studio 2008.  Also in BOE XI 3.1, the SDK is installed in a common directory.  By default the directory is:
C:/Program Files/Business Objects/common/

Do know that it’s possible that when you upgrade to a new version of BusinessObjects, there may be issues with trying to connect to a older environment.  It shouldn’t be a problem, since there are other applications such as the Import Wizard, which are able to connect to an older CMS as well as the current environment, but that wasn’t the case for this user:  XI 3.0, .NET SDK and Visual Studio 2008….GRRR!

Although BusinessObjects BusinessIntelligence v4.0 is still in ramp up, early indications are that it too will ship with the Visual Studio 2008 redistributable package.

Compile Time vs. Run Time

After several conversations with technical support, I also found that there were some important differentiations to make between Compile Time and Run Time development and which .NET framework is supported.  Let me summarize how these scenarios are supported so there is no confusion.

Supporting Escalations

I strongly recommend you call technical support and get clarification about your combination of products and whether or not they are supported.  If you have a problem and it appears to be a bug, engineering will only support it if it can be reproduced on a supported configuration.  Make sure you ask support whether or not you are on a supported platform.

NOTE:  You will also find that your bug will need to be reproduced
in either C# or Visual Basic .NET to be addressed by technical support.

My Advice

At the end of the day, check and double-check the PAR.  You can find them on SDN here or on the Support Portal here.

Clearly if you are going to use the Crystal Reports Viewer embedded within Visual Studio, then you need to check compatibility with your version of Visual Studio and of the .NET Framework.  Be very careful.

If on the other hand, you are only using the BusinessObjects Enterprise Platform SDK, then you are much safer ground.  In other words, if you chose NOT use the Crystal Reports Viewer embedded within your Visual Studio application and only opendocument, you can avoid the most significant incompatibilities between BusinessObjects/Crystal Reports and Visual Studio.

Before You Upgrade

Do not upgrade one part of your infrastructure unless you are sure that this does not include impacts in other places.  Do not upgrade versions of operating systems, databases, development platforms, etc. without fully considering the repercussions across your entire environment.

Sometimes you can get away with an unsupported configuration and not have any problems.  SAP is working hard to keep up with all the changes being made by our technology partners, but do understand that if you are want to use the latest and greatest development solutions from Microsoft, you may need to upgrade your entire BusinessObjects environment as well.

If your BusinessObjects environment is 3 years old, the chances are your Microsoft development environment will need to be 3 years old as well.

«Good BI»

A very common question when it comes to SAP BusinessObjects is:  How should I manage my SAP BusinessObjects security authorizations?

Although that is an extremely broad topic, today I want to discuss the issue of leveraging an external corporate directory to manage user authorizations.

NOTE:  It's important to remember that only the
user/group membership gets delegated out.
The group/object rights assignments must still be
performed by the BI administrator.

In most large organizations, there is a security team which manages users ids and user groups.  These users and groups are typically stored in a Corporate Directory such as LDAP, Windows Active Directory, etc.

The userid and password from the Corporate Directory is the method through which users are able to authenticate themselves (via secLDAP, secWinAD, secSAP, etc.)  So the question naturally arises:  Should I manage all my authorizations through groups managed via external security solutions?

The answer for your organization will depend on the answers to the following questions:

1. How much cooperation is there between the BI Administrator and the Corporate Directory Team?
2. How quickly can new groups be added to the Corporate Directory?
3. How many groups would you need to add to the Corporate Directory to manage all the BI security scenarios?
4. Do I want to delegate the bulk of my BI security management to the Corporate Directory Team?

There are pros and cons to any software implementation and the right solution must be made according to the culture and policies that fit your organization.

Leveraging External Security Exclusively

In certain cases the Corporate Directory team may be able to create and manage all the groups BI Administrators will need for security within the Corporate Directory and they are able to assign the correct security when a user is provisioned.

The advantages include:

• Single location for user/group membership
• Delegated Model – less for the BI administrator to manage

The disadvantages include:

• Delegating group creation and user group membership

This model has been successfully implemented at a large insurance company with 500+ BusinessObjects-related groups mapped to an external Active Directory server.

Leveraging A Mixed Model

At a high-level the mixed model leverages:

1. External security management for course grain security
2. Internal secEnterprise groups for fine grain security

I recommend course grain security to manage which users should have access to the BI environment (e.g. NY Users, Georgia Users, Reporting Users, etc.)  Once the user has been imported into the system, we can fine tune their access via fine grain security.

NOTE:  We refer to these as Data Access Roles because
the users in the Georgia Users group only get to see Georgia reports
and the corresponding Georgia data.

Administrators can use internal secEnterprise groups for managing fine grain security.  You can create roles such as:  WebI Viewer, WebI Developer, InfoView user, which can control the product specific rights allowed to the users of that role.

NOTE:  We refer to these as Entitlement Roles because
the users in the WebI Viewer group are allowed limited
application functionality.

The advantages include:

• A clean delineation between the Corporate Directory and the BI Security
• Balance between corporate control and system flexibility

The disadvantages include:

• Security being managed in two places
• The need for the BI Administrator to be notified of fine grain role changes so users can be remapped

It’s hard to say for sure whether the Mixed Model tends to work better in most organizations than the delegated model.  You need to determine which model will work best for your organization.  What I can say is that  both models allow for extremely flexible deployments amongst the multitude of different scenarios that I have come across.

Don’t Forget

Regardless of which model you use there is something you should know…

One organization which had communication problems with their LDAP server and as a result of a synchronization problem, most of their users were deleted from their BusinessObjects environment.  Users – Inboxes – Personal Folders.   Gone.

There is one extremely important rule when leveraging an external Corporate Directory.  Make sure that every external user in your BusinessObjects environment is mapped to at least one secEnterprise group.  This will guarantee the the mapped users id will never accidently be deleted from the system.  For Java SDK samples around user management, go here.

«Good BI»

Do you understand BusinessObjects security?

Granted Yes?
Denied No?
Not Specified Not Sure?

Well now is your chance to prove it.  Show us how good you really are.

My son always loves to test me with hypotheticals.

Dad can I have permission to see that R-rated movie?… No.

What if I take the dog for a walk?…  No.

… What if I mow the grass all summer?…  No.

… What if I get A’s for the rest of my life?…  No.

Fortunately getting granted access to InfoObjects within SAP BusinessObjects is a little more straight forward.

Quiz Show

To access the sample 24 scenario quiz click on the picture below:

Click here to start the Quiz

Results

So how did you do?  Get them all right?  Yes?  Then it’s time to get certified!

I’ll admit that regardless of how many times I go through this quiz there are always one or two that trip me up.

You can also download an offline copy of the quiz here:
http://trustedbi.com/files/user_rights.zip

Have a great week!

«Good BI»