© 2015 Mikan Associates. All rights reserved.

SAP BO User Group

June 5, 2015

Michael Artz, Pingting Li

About Mikan Associates

• A trusted provider of real impactful data and analytic solutions

• Known for its long-term focus on customer service and business relations

• Offices in Greater Chicago Area and Wisconsin

• Data Analytics Strategy, Data Management, Information Delivery, Big Data and Business Intelligence Training

• Our SAP Technologies

- SAP Business Objects, SAP Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, SAP Predictive Analysis

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Agenda

• Upgrade Overview

- Steps for BI upgrade

- Content Migration - Using the Upgrade Management Tool

• Recent Client Experience

- Scope of The Client Project

- Deski to Deski Migration

- Deski to Webi Conversion

- Folder Structure and Report Selection – Moving reports with SDK

• Questions

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Steps To Take for BI Upgrade/Content Migration

Assessment and

Preparation for the BI 4.1

upgrade

Installing the BI4.1

platform

Configuring the BI

Perform Content

Migration UAT

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Preparing for the BI 4.1 upgrade

• Environment Assessment

• Consider your users and associates securities

- Perfect time to determine other audiences

- Perfect time to restructure

• Content Inventory and Cleanup

- Identify content that the upgrade management tool can't upgrade…Example: Deski Reports

- Consider how to handle those types of situations: Example: RCT for Deski to Webi Migration

• Perform Backups

- Repositories

- Objects

- Custom Web Apps

- HTML Pages

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Installing the BI4.1 platform

• Installing in a separate environment is the recommended option

• A side-by-side deployment is possible but not recommended.

- You can install BI4.1 on the same server where either XI3.x or XIR2 SP2 is

running if your existing server satisfies all the requirements.

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Upgrade Management Tool (UMT)

• A client tool deployed with the BI4.1 Platform

• Allows you to upgrade content prior to BI 4.1 but after XI R2 SP2

- If your original version older than XI R2 SP2, you need to install BO R3 as

a pass-through version in order to upgrade it to version 4.

• Given the option of doing a complete upgrade or an incremental

upgrade.

• UMT reads from source, saves on the local Hard Disk and writes to the

target.

- Note: Did you prepare with sufficient disk space?

• Gives the option to do live-to-live, and live-BIAR-live migration

(recommended)

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Complete Upgrade vs Incremental Upgrade

Complete Upgrade Incremental Upgrade

Upgrade content all at once Upgrade content in stages

Only one system to maintain Two systems to maintain

Locks down entire system Locks down only department folder

Issues may affect entire system Issues affect only department folder

Longer downtime Shorter downtime

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Content Migration: BI Content that gets upgraded

• Security, Access Levels, Users, User Groups, Calendars, Events

• Folders, Categories, Personal Documents, Repository Objects

• Web Intelligence Reports (Connections, Scheduled Jobs, Instances), Crystal Reports (different versions)

• Universes (UNV)

• Remote Connections, Replication Jobs

• Mobile Subscriptions, Offline Documents

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Content Migration: BI Content that doesn’t get upgraded

• Will require manual intervention in order to be upgraded

- CR to CR Enterprise

- Deski to Webi (Webi will replace Deski)

- UNV to UNX

- Voyager Workspaces (SAP BusinessObjects Analysis will replace Voyager)

- Xcelsius embedded URLs, web service URLs, hostnames, certain formats

- OpenDocument URLs

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Tip: Crystal Reports for

Enterprise focuses on the BI

platform and connecting to

data from SAP BW. Crystal

Reports for Enterprise does

not include some features that

are present in Crystal Reports

2013. Crystal Reports for

Enterprise will not have all the

functionality from Crystal

Reports 2013.

Report Conversion Tool

• A client tool deployed with the BI4.1 Platform

• The Report Conversion Tool Converts Deski to Webi

• Once converted, you can publish to the same folder

as the original Desktop Intelligence report or to a

different folder.

• Ability to set Source and destination through the log-

in page

• The tool does not convert all Desktop Intelligence

features and reports: The level of conversion

depends on the features in the original report.

• Some features prevent the report from being

converted. Other features are modified, re-

implemented, or removed by the tool during

conversion

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Scope of the Real World Client Report Migration Project

• Original Version XI R2 SP1

• Destination Version XI 4.1

• Content type: Mostly Webi Reports, small amount (less than 1000 out of 70,000) deski reports

and less than 100 Xcelsius objects

• Number of Reports: 75k+, migrating 5k to the new system

• 3500+ Users with Enterprise Authentication

• 200+ Groups

Experience of Using the Upgrade Tool

• Steps we took:

- Communicate with the clients and find out a percentage of the reports to test

- Set up Xi 3.1 Pass-Thru environment to drive Migration

- Use 3.1’s upgrade management tool to pull test content from R2 to 3.1

- Use 4.1’s upgrade management tool to Complete Prelim Migration to SAP BI 4.1 DEV to validate Pass/Fail

ratio

- Adjust report migration strategy if needed (timeline, tasks)

- Migrate all content from R2 to 4.1, passing through 3.1

- Disable the 3.1 environment when the migration is done

• Results:

- Webi Report: More than 99% passed through the migration

- Deski Report: 10% of fail rate

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Tips:

• Always use the higher version’s UMT

as the functionalities are more

complete

• A preliminary migration is helpful

when determine the pass/fail rate

• Generally, the 3.1 pass through server

requires less CPU power and disk

space

Experience of Deski to Webi Conversion

• Tools used: Report Conversion Tool (RCT)

• Features that can not be converted

- OLAP/XML/Visual Basic data provider

- Filter with a Freehand-SQL

- alculation perand – webi can define calculation in query panel

- Example: Select col1,col2,col3 from table1 group by col1,col2 having ( sum(col3) >

all select sum(col3) from table1 group by col4)

- User defined objects

• Features that can partially be converted

- Automatic refresh

- Complex blocks and filters

- Page break header/footer

• Note: With Report Conversion Tool(RCT), besides the partially converted documents,

you may also have partially published documents. Partially published documents

happen when the RCT can not find the associated universe during the conversion. The

partially published documents can still be opened and viewed, but they are not

refreshable.

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Tips:

• RCT generally will not

give you a specific

reason or percentage

converted.

• Desktop Intelligence

Compatibility Pack

(DCP) is a good tool to

install when

transferring the content

from deski to webi –

DCP is supported by

SAP till 2017.

Moving Reports with

SDK

New Folder Security Means Moving Reports

• Incorporating new Active Directory structure into environment going forward to allow for security model

• Allowing SSO and integrating all reports into new model – all of the reports will need to be moved

- Need to move over 5000 reports to new folders

- Keep the manual activity to a minimum

- Reports need to be selected from 70000 reports

- Resources

- Excel sheet of all reports including reportIDs

- Read access to custom Auditing database with all report names and report IDs

- Access to use Query Builder

- Open source library for reading csv

• opencsv.sourcfourge.net

Folder Restructure at a Glance

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Curr

ent F

old

er

Str

uctu

re

Ne

w F

old

er

Str

uctu

re

Migrate Approximately

5000 Reports

Sources for Report Move

• 2 CSV sheets

- master_sheet.csv

- folders.csv

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Column Name Description

Report_ID Integer ID (SI_ID) of the report object

Report_Name Name (SI_NAME) of the report object

Destination_Folder Name of the folder to move to

Business_Unit Name of the business unit the report belongs to

Column Name Description

Folder_ID Integer ID (SI_ID) of the folder object

Folder_Name Name (SI_NAME) of the folder object

Business_Unit Name of the business unit the folder belongs to

Code Snippet /*Variables*/

IEnterpriseSession boIEnterpriseSession;

IInfoStore boInfoStore;

IInfoObjects boInfoObjects;

IInfoObject boReportObject;

boIEnterpriseSession = CrystalEnterprise.getSessionMgr().logon(user, password, cmsName, cmsAuthType);

boInfoStore = (IInfoStore)boIEnterpriseSession.getService(servername, "InfoStore");

boInfoObjects = boInfoStore.query("Select * From CI_INFOOBJECTS Where SI_KIND = 'Webi' AND SI_ID = " + reportID );

boReportObject = (IInfoObject)boInfoObjects.get(0);

/*move the report*/

boReportObject.setParent(newFolderID);

boInfoStore.commit(boInfoObjects);

Issues

• When validating current folder before moving

- Needed to commit IInfoStore object after getParentID()

- Error was “creating circular reference within the hierarchy”

• When deploying

- Created executable JAR from IDE

- Package required libraries into generated JAR

- When extracting libraries into generated JAR, received run-time

exception

• Things to consider in future

- JSmooth will create native Windows Launcher

- Deploy to tomcat with WAR

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Questions