Outlook at SAP Business Objects BI 4.3
At the end of 2019, SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence Platform 4.3 (SBOP BI 4.3) will be introduced with several new features. Even if some changes might still take place before final release, the most important ones have been established in the meantime:
The Fiori launchpad will become the default user interface and contain all the functions of the former launchpad. The classic BI launchpad will (initially) remain available and continue to be maintained and updated in terms of functionality.
Web Intelligence presents itself as a completely newly developed version based on HTML 5, both in the web and desktop variants. The interface has a more modern design and is meant to be much simpler and tidier for the user. There will no longer be any Java version.
All client applications will be shipped in 64-bit versions.
Installation and configuration have been greatly modified, and are meant to be much easier and simpler, particularly with regard to SSO and SSL.
Furthermore, there will be a higher degree of interlacing with SAP BI cloud solutions. The systems can be combined to a greater extent (hybrid approaches); this applies to data sources as well as user administration and reports.
Users created in the SAP Analytics Cloud, for example, can be included automatically in SAP BO on request, and vice versa. For this purpose, SBOP 4.3 also supports login with the e-mail address as the user name.
WebI reports can be made available in the cloud. This enables evaluations in which SAP Analytics Cloud models access (OnPremise) universes, and (OnPremise) WebI reports access cloud data.
Crystal Reports will be retained, and will continue to undergo regular updates of database drivers and bug fixes.
Furthermore, a number of legacy features will be eliminated:
Desktop Intelligence will be (permanently) removed, just as the related, server-side support.
There will be no longer be any Flash support. This means the end of dashboards/Xcelsius.
In SBOP 4.2 too, Flash will not be supported beyond the end of 2020.
Lumira Designer is recommended as a replacement. Migration tools are not available, however.
The following products will also be discontinued:
- Explorer
- Roambi
- Lumira Discovery
SAP Analytics Cloud is recommended as a replacement here. No migration tool is planned so far in this case either.