What's New in Business Objects 4.0

Some notable changes in the new product:

1.      Universe design has changed a lot (really needed a uplift for the last 10 years :)

2.      Xcelsius can report from universe.

3.      A few new options in CMC (like Monitoring tool, auditing as separate options) .

4.      Deski (oh my good old deski) is not there anymore.

5.      You can use a universe directly over a BO Dashboard Designer (i.e. our very dear xcelsius.. Good they have change the name..i could never spell it correctly !!! ). However you have to use .unx version of universe and not the old .unv version. There is a tool to change the .unv 's to .unx.

6.      You can directly create a webi report on Bex query . There is no need of designer to directly report on bex in BO 4.0.

7.      The menu option has changed a lot in Webi . Now it is a "Menu Ribbon". i.e. it's structured. Initially i had a lot of difficulty finding the options from the menu ribbon. However with time i think we will be comfortable.

8.      In the universe you have an option of a "query panel" by which you can quickly create a report . It’s much better than the previous versions.

9.      The "crow feet" to show one to many relation is not there anymore. I loved the crow feet. Similarly the detailed object has a weird picture and not the old green triangle we are accustomed to.

10.  Server is 64-bit mode in 4.0. So you might need to upgrade from a 32 bit OS to 64 bit OS.

11.  "BI Launch Pad" aka Infoview looks a bit different. It has a home tab and a document tab. Home tab has 4 sections i) Recently viewed docs, ii) Recently run docs, iii) Unread messages and iv) Unread alerts . You can directly create a webi report , BI Workspace etc from the home page through a few icons readily available on home page. However these are just cosmetic things . A good thing they have done is you can open more than one report in a tabbed manner in "BI Launch Pad" aka infoview. So you can flick from one report to another by simply clicking the report tab. You can also dock a report. So next time you login to BI Launch Pad (infoview) you will see the report open in the tab on top .

12.  Universe is multidimensional – I.e. we will be able to keep the hierarchies and not the flattened structure we used to see in the previous versions.

13.  The auditing data model has been redeveloped from scratch for use of reporting. (So they claim)

14.  CMC has a “Monitoring dashboard” feature in auditing option. This will monitor the servers and the services running on the servers.

15.  Crystal Report has two 2 versions now – i) Crystal Report Enterprise version and ii) Crystal Report normal version . The Enterprise version will ONLY connect to the universe. The normal version will connect to all other data sources.

16.  Webi has an option to access the data provides like in deski. This will help us to see sample data and the length of time a query runs etc.

17.  Webi will have a capability to look into a hierarchy from the universe .

18.  BO Dashboard (i.e. Xcelcius) has been integrated to the BI platform.

19.  If used through the BI platform BO dashboards (i.e. Xcelcius) can be audited.

20.  SAP integration kit is part of the core product.

21.  New drilling feature of charts and graphs.

22.  Minimum version from which you can upgrade to BO 4.0 is BOXI Rel 2 SP 2. If an organization is on BO 5 or BO 6 they will have to upgrade to BOXI Rel 2 SP 2 or higher and then upgrade to BO 4.0.

23.  There is still no scheduling feature in BO Dashboard (i.e. Xcelcius).

24.  There is no change to explorer.

25.  Connection of BW cubes to universe has been removed. You have to use data federator to connect to a BW cube.

26.  As a mentioned before you can use universe to create a BO Dashboard report. However you cannot merge queries like in Webi.

27.  A new feature has been added in Data Services called Text Analysis. This will help in sourcing data from online feeds.

28.  They have enhanced the conversion tool. So you should get less issues while converting deski reports (so they claim).