The simple answer is “no” and there are many good reasons to upgrade to XI 3.1 as soon as possible.

Firstly, BusinessObjects XI 3.1 has been the general release for a couple of years now and has proven to be a stable and solid platform. It brings a new version of Web Intelligence with the Rich Client (offline) capability with access to external data providers like Excel. It also has other features, previously only available in Desktop Intelligence, like the fold/unfold feature and stored procedure support through the universe. It adds new functionality also like the ability to track data changes between versions, contextual hyperlinking and use of drop-down selection boxes for prompts.

At the same time, XI 3.1 fully supports Desktop Intelligence reports unchanged which is quite significant when you consider that there will be no support for Desktop Intelligence in XI 4. This means that XI 3.1 will be the last BusinessObjects release to support Desktop Intelligence or the old Full Client reports.

BusinessObjects XI 4.0 will be a major new release with a lot of new functionality some of which will be available in the first 4.0 release and some which will be released later in service pack updates. It will be a 64-bit software application. It will have a new semantic layer that will combine the capabilities of the old BusinessObjects universe and Crystal Business Views and with a slew of new functionality including support of OLAP (MDX) data sources like SAP BW and MS OLAP cubes. The old BusinessObjects Universe Designer will remain supported in XI 4 for compatibility and easier transition.

There are new functionalities and capabilities in Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, Crystal and other content providers including taking advantage of the new semantic layer and universe design tool. There are two versions of Crystal – Crystal Enterprise which is new and uses the new semantic layer and Crystal Reports 2011 which is a continuation of Crystal Reports 2008. There is a new OLAP analysis tool called Advanced Analysis which replaces Voyager and there are significant improvements to Data Services and the BOE infrastructure functionality.

There will also be a new utility to move the contents of your old BusinessObjects content to XI 4. The Import Wizard is effectively replaced by this new tool called the Upgrade Manager Tool. This works for upgrades from XI 3.1 and the plan is to also be able to upgrade from XI R2 with security model changes. There is no upgrade available from earlier releases meaning you would need to move to XI R2 or XI 3.1 before moving to XI 4.

The ramp up will probably last 3 to 6 months so the general availability of XI 4.0 is expected sometime between February 2011 and May 2011. It is unlikely that the first service pack will be available until late in the year and most existing BO customers will probably not look at moving to XI 4 until 2012 or 2013 (based on previous trends).

For these BO customers still using Desktop Intelligence, there will be the added consideration and work of converting or replacing their old reports with Web Intelligence which for some may be a considerable effort and cost.

According to information disseminated at the ASUG BO annual conference in October, in addition to Desktop Intelligence, the following other existing BO XI products will be end of  life :  Voyager, Encyclopedia/Discussions and Performance Manager.

Historically, the current and immediately prior software releases tend to be actively supported for all software issues which would suggest that at some point in 2011 only XI 4.0 and XI 3.1 will be considered the actively supported releases.

Taking all of this information into consideration, it does make sense to upgrade to BusinessObjects XI 3.1 in the coming months if you have not done so already.

IBIS 2010 Beach view

This year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) was just packed with high quality and in-depth boot camps and seminars covering Xcelsius, Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Data Services, BO XI 3.1 Administration and lots more. It was also located at the beautiful Ritz Carlton, Dana Point on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean which was the perfect remedy after a day of absorbing tons of knowledge.

The Welcome reception on Sunday night, entitled “Seeing Beyond Business Intelligence” was set in the Solutions Showcase area where sponsors demonstrated and discussed some of their latest business intelligence solutions.  I delivered the keynote the following morning on the same “Seeing Beyond” theme and highlighted some interesting business intelligence customer case studies.  The keynote on the Tuesday from Santiago Becerra, CEO of Mellmo, was quite fascinating as he took the audience through “the Evolution of Think” and cleverly demonstrated how putting fun into regular tasks can change people’s habits as well as their adoption of solutions. Showing Roambi, the latest business intelligence solution for the iPad, really brought the point home well.

The 2010 Best Xcelsius Awards demonstrated how far many companies have come in applying Xcelsius in very complex and powerful applications and inspired many others to go even further so I would watch out for next year’s awards.

I had the opportunity to meet with many people during the event and dive into some great discussions on both existing challenges in various BI implementations as well as future directions. In general, it appeared that most companies lag about 3 to 5 years behind the latest releases of SAP BusinessObjects and other BI solutions. Occasionally there is some critical new functionality that will compel a company to adopt a new release sooner but that tends to be the exception to the rule.  Many customers expressed that having reliability, stability and consistent performance are more important than most new functionality. Some of the newer solutions like Xcelsius dashboards and Roambi mobile business intelligence appear to circumnavigate this pattern since they can often be deployed and highly effective outside of the main business intelligence and production applications. A further big factor here is cost as many companies are more hesitant, due in part to the recent global recession, to spend large amounts of time and money on new software until they have conclusively proven a solid return on investment. For this reason incremental software purchases and pilot projects have become very popular in the BI space.

This was evident at IBIS as customers expressed a lot of interest in Xcelsius, XDM, Roambi, XWIS, GMaps, 360View, Version Manager and SAP BO EDGE solutions for very specific business issues and needs.

All in all, IBIS 2010 was a great BI gathering and information exchange and continues to grow in popularity. A couple of lucky attendees won iPads and a couple of not-so-lucky attendees dropped their phones in the ocean, but judging by the feedback everyone can’t wait to do it again.

Here are a few of the comments received back on IBIS 2010 :

“The IBIS conference was terrific this year.  I can’t wait to incorporate write-backs into our dashboards, and InfoBurst 2009 with dashboard bursting opens new doors for delivering customer information.  I also really enjoyed Aluchemie’s customer demo with all of their challenges they had to overcome!”

Kim Marshall, Waldinger Corporation

“I wanted to commend you and your team on the wonderful seminar.  My colleagues are very enthusiastic about their boot camp and the knowledgeable instructors they have met. You and your team have been wonderful throughout the past few days and everyone’s terrific attitudes have made the seminar a great success”

Melinda Dennis, Aluchemie

When asked, “What was the best part of the seminar for you?”, here are some of the responses :

“User Panel – excellent recognition of organizations with creative solutions”

“The class time. The first time I have ever been to a seminar where I was asked right from the beginning to reverse engineer an example”

“ The chance to talk and network with pros, find out what SAP doesn’t tell you about the product and get the best practices from people who have been in the trenches”

“…invaluable talking with other companies and knowledge sharing”

“… the workshops were excellent and very exercise intense so there was no boredom factor”

“Meeting with other users of the tools – It is a great way to get new ideas”

“The tips on real life best practices were extremely valuable – something that you cannot always get from other conferences”

“Size of the event led to good instruction and interaction”

“The training far surpasses any other training in the BI field. InfoSol has created a habitat for intensive training efforts at an economical price”

“The fact that I am learning things that are actually going to help me solve current problems – which also helps me sleep better at night”

Answer: There are a few application variables that BusinessObjects provides for use when a user logs into InfoView, one of which is BOUSER.  BOUser is the variable for the userId that is logged in and can be used when Xcelsius is aware of the user session.  The user session is passed to Xcelsius via a flash variable that has been made available in XI for this purpose.  It is called, CELogonToken.

BOUSER contains the value of the userId of the user logged in.  It can be used to provide user-specific row-level security through the universe design by adding a self join to a field containing the userIds in your data.  With XI3.1 Designer, this can be applied at the class level (across all objects in a class), or through the traditional method of being applied just when objects from that specific table are used in the query.

Here is an example of how this variable is applied:
Note that the self join is applied against the Manager field.

The Manager field for eFashion contains usernames like “Queen” and “Tuttle”.  For this example, we have added these as users into our CMC.

In QAAWS, I have created a web service to return Manager and their corresponding Store.  This query automatically prompts for the BOUSER since the SQL contains the @Variable(‘BOUSER’) restriction.

In Xcelsius, I have referenced this QAAWS with the appropriate connection defined and entering Name of Manager and Store name results into cells that are viewable through a spreadsheet component.

IMPORTANT: QAAWS will return a promptValue invalid error message if a valid value is not declared as a default for bouser.  Make sure you point bouser to a cell in the Excel spreadsheet of your Xcelsius design and input a valid userId as a default.

In order for Xcelsius to know the BOUSER userId of the user logged into BO, Xcelsius needs to be aware of the session.  If you enter a login and password to the QAAWS connection, that username will be used all the time.  Instead, these entries should be left blank.

If they are left blank, then the users will be prompted to log into QAAWS when they attempt to refresh the QAAWS query from the dashboard. 

For both performance and ease of use, it is usually desired that the users continue using their existing session for a single-sign on method.  To do this, a flash variable connection should be added which includes the range name CELogonToken.  This hands the existing session token over to Xcelsius seamlessly.

The BOUSER or userId is not viewable in the token value as displayed.  The token, however, makes this application variable available for use as the Login value passed to the QAAWS connector upon refresh.

In the end, my excel spreadsheet design looks like this:

I export the Xcelsius dashboard to the SAP BusinessObjects Platform (note that an Enterprise license is required for this functionality).

Then, I log into InfoView as Tuttle and view the dashboard. When I click the refresh button, the Manager Tuttle and his/her store gets returned.

Incidentally, the default value of Queen is never used.  The default is only to allow the bouser variable to load with the QAAWS definition, but only the actual user logged in ever gets passed to the query.