The unavoidable SAP front- end BI7 upgrade: lessons learned. It takes some convincing to get buy in from your stakeholders to provide a significant budget for IT resources, time available from business users, and to some degree disrupt . For many companies, the SAP Business Explorer (BEx) toolset as delivered in 2. BEx 3. x) by and large still meets the business requirements and the upgraded version (BEx BI7), introduced in 2. If you mainly use the Excel plug- in (BEx Analyzer) then there is very little reason to celebrate when upgrading to BI7. SAP Front End Installation Guide July 2002 7 Upgrading and Patching The term “upgrade” is used to refer to the transition from one Release to another, for example from 4.6C to 4.6D. The term “patch” refers to changes. Those companies using different channels for reporting (Web and Excel) and those companies using integrated planning will find there are significant benefits in running BI7. SAP has stopped support for BEx 3. There is no more product development and SAP will not provide resolutions for issues any issues you might still find. In addition, the latest SAP GUI does no longer contain the old BEx version. Upgrade to the latest version of SAP GUI 730 for Windows. This is a required update from SAP GUI 720 - patch 7. The link to download this updated version can be found on the EBS support web site.
If you have to upgrade your GUI (for example if you want to run SAP Business Client, which requires the latest GUI version) then you lose the old BEx environment. And again, unfortunately, the upgrade might be more challenging than you might think. During the upgrade you will be confronted with choices where the only options are . But before going into the detail let’s have a look at the wider context. It is not a dashboarding tool, you cannot build composite web applications with it, it does not run on mobile platforms and there will be other shortcomings if you look for specific use cases or deployment scenarios. SAP does not believe in . Instead, it offers a set of reporting tools, some strong on dashboarding and mobile, others on ad- hoc analysis or data exploration. Having said that, it is important to recognise that Business Explorer is an extremely adaptable, very powerful and user friendly BI reporting tool. There are more reliable indicators of the opposite (although not yet on officially published roadmaps): The OLAP engine will be redeveloped to optimise it for execution on SAP HANA. Business users can still navigate through their reports the way they did it before, and in addition to this they have the option to drag and drop. This drag and drop feature makes navigation a lot more intuitive and you will find that if you need to train up new employees they will more easily master the tool. This is the biggest improvement the business users will see, if not the only. The application to maintain and develop reports has changed significantly, so your power users and BI team will be happy. They will benefit most from the upgrade. You can set properties for multiple items at the same time, it is easier to copy and paste sections of a report definition, the whole interface has become more intuitive and the advanced report writers will benefit from some new features and settings. The not so good news is that some of the existing functionality in 3. BEx BI7. And to add insult to injury, this missing functionality is poorly documented in the official SAP documentation. The best place to go to is the SCN WIKI “Migration of BEx Analyzer 3x to BEx Analyzer 7x”. In this blog post I have listed which of these undocumented changes have the largest impact on the user community. For others the workaround is so cumbersome it is probably best to accept the functionality is no longer there. In any case, you have to be aware of this reduced functionality when upgrading your system. In addition to listing this undocumented functionality loss I have also added some lessons learned from the upgrade project I recently worked on. You can make them appear in the navigation panel again by adding them as . If you do this, wildcard searches are not possible; selections might disappear when changing variables and in some cases annoying error messages appear. It is not possible to . In addition, if you leave the option . Big bang or a phased roll- out? The big bang requires a huge organisational effort, coordinating training, support and upgrade activities that everything can come together in that one weekend. The latter might seem attractive but can be difficult especially if the same query is shared across different teams or divisions. The last project I worked on we thought there was a . That way, part of the user community could still use the old (3. BEx BI7. This turned out to be a mistake though. Because queries are used in different contexts and have personalized data we got ourselves in trouble, and ended up doing a lot of manual work which would not have been necessary if we had simply upgraded the queries. Think about users’ favourites, variants, APD’s, pre- queries, Open Hub, Workbooks, Web Application Designer and interfaces to other systems and you start to get an appreciation of the impact of effectively changing a query technical name. Identify which functionality has gone missing and what has changed and discuss the impact of this with the user group. Agree workarounds and plan time to implement these. Communicate clearly to the user community what functionality has gone missing and which things work differently. Test, test, test. Especially for computer savvy people it is easy to say it is . It is not just a technical upgrade but a significant change in end user functionality. Plan the project accordingly. Upgrade your BW Back End and Front End (GUI and BI plug- in) to the latest patch level. Each support pack still comes with lots of notes for Business Explorer so make sure your house is in order before you upgrade the GUIDevelop your own Workbook template and do not use the SAP delivered template. The SAP template looks pretty, but does not let you incorporate a second query in a workbook looking the same layout and has some hidden VBA which is difficult to get rid of. With the right resources to find and apply the best possible solution for the changed functionality, and given sufficient time to prepare the user community for the changes ahead, the project will be successful.
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