At a recent customer project my teammate and I were facing an issue with importing Webi documents and universes into Translation Manager (all on BO4.1 SP4) getting the following error message:

org.apache.axis2.AxisFault: Unable to find servers in CMS, servers could be down or disabled by the administrator (FWN 01014)

There is a KB article describing this error and a solution: http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1879675

One hand we followed the instructions in the KB article and specified the hostname for each server. Although our server is multihomed (that means has more than one network interfaces) we didn't thought about this before hand because the second network interface goes into a backup LAN and is never used for communication with e.g. the client tools. In addition everything worked fine so far – until we got the issue with Translation Manager. Still, just setting the hostname was not enough. On the server side there is the Windows firewall enabled, therefore we had to assign static request ports to several services. We already did so before our issue with the Translation Manager for the CMS, Input & Output FRS, all Webi Processing Server. We used TCPView to analyze on which ports Translation Manager was opening connections. As long as there were requests on ports which we didn't specify in the CMC (some random port number e.g. 56487) we narrowed down all the services which Translation Manager establishes a connection. We had to specify a port for all of the following servers:

  • The Adaptive Processing Server (APS) hosting the DSL-Bridge Service
  • The APS hosting the Client Auditing Proxy Service
  • The APS hosting the Search Index Service
  • The APS hosting the Translation Service
  • The WACS (Web Application Container Server)

Besides the issue with Translation Manager we had another issue with creating new universe connections in the Universe Design Tool. When creating a new connection we had to wait up to 30 minutes ( ! ) to get to the wizard page where you can select from the list of available database drivers. Still, after 30 minutes everything worked fine and could create the connection successfully. Based on our experience with Translation Manager we run again TCPView and found that we need to assign a port number to both connection servers (32 and 64 bit) in CMC. Having done this, creating a new connection now works without any waiting time.

After all: If you have firewalls between your BO server and client tools, just assign a port to all servers available and open the port on the firewall (the only exception might be for the Event Server as I'm really not aware of any communication between this server and a component outside the BO server)

What is the right SAP BusinessObjects frontend for a given situation? A question I'm asked nearly every day. When I was confronted first with this topic  a few years ago the taken approach was a highly sophisticated Excel spreadsheet in order to assess all available BOBJ tools based on a feature list. The only problem was: At the bottom line there was never a clear winner. Next approach were the famous decision trees like the following:

BO-Tool-DecisionTree

Not bad as a first guess. And in an ideal world where the basic functionality would be the same for all BOBJ tools such a tree could work indeed. But given the situation that even today – nearly ten year after the aquisition of Crystal by BO – support for universes is still not exactly the same in Webi, Crystal Reports and Xcelsius (aka Dashboards) and especilly the maturity of a tool or a sub component of it is vastly different, there is no clever way to tell you which tool to use for which purpose.

Although you can't give a distinct answer to the question "which tool to use for what", I'm convinced that the following rule of thumb will be valid in most situations and for a majority of organisations – the only assumption is that there is no limitation out of licensing. That means I assume you have a license for all or at least the most important frontend tools. The idea behind this rule is that a priority rating is more helpful than a feature or use case driven decision tree.

Here is my rule of thumb:

  1. Try it with Web Intelligence
  2. If Webi didn't work, try it with Crystal Reports
  3. If Crystal Reports didn't work, try it with one of the "niche" tools

Let me share some thoughts about this priority list:

Why should we start with Web Intelligence?There are various reasons for this:

  • From a features perspective Web Intelligence provides the most widest range in the BOBJ tool suite. You can use Webi for creating classical standard reports, you can use it for dashboard like applications (think about Input Controls and the ease of use regarding drilling – e.g. compared to Xcelsius…), you can use it for self-service reporting, you can use it as a data pump using XLSX export or interface to other applications using BI Web Services etc.
  • From a maturity perspective it is one of the most stable and mature applications in the BOBJ world. I tell you this as an native "Crystal guy". But whereas Crystal Reports 2011 runs stable the same way as it did for the last decade, the new Crystal Reports for Enterprise is just crap compared to both, the legacy CR and Webi.
  • From a data source perspective: Webi is the only tool which fully supports all kind of Universe stuff. I've never heard of any limitation that Webi would not support something what you can do in a Universe (by design). But let me compare this to Crystal Reports: On one hand you can use only UNX universes in CR4Ent, on the other not all type of queries are supported. Crystal still has the limitation that if a universe query results in multiple SQL statements it fails to handle it as there is no local "micro cube" as with Webi. Of course this whole argument implies that we value a "common semantic layer" to be of high "added value" to an organization and therefore should be supported in its full scope. But there is even more to add: Webi handles not only multiple SQL result sets per query, it can also leverage multiple queries and easily join them. Although I'm not a friend of "merged dimensions", there are many situations where this capability is the only work around to get the job done at the end of the day (and not three monthes later when the data finally arrived in the DWH…). No clever way to do this in Crystal Reports or Xcelsius directly.
  • From an SAP BW perspective: Two or three years ago we had to decide for Crystal Reports often because of its better connectivity to SAP BW and all around it with hierarchy handling etc. These days are "passé". My most recent experience with Webi using the BICS interface are very promising. Totally in contrast with CR4Ent which crashes regularly, even with the latest patch level.
  • From a usability perspective: Although SAP currently tries to position Webi to be the tool where business users develop the reports, I think its usability is equivalently valubale for IT folks too. Report development is quick and straight forward – once you've got used to the ribbon style menues 😉
  • From an installation footprint perspective: Given the situation that SAP releases new patches nearly every third or four week, patching client installations is an nightmare. The more valuable are fully web based deployment scenarios. Therefore once again, Webi is the favorite.

Still, Web Intelligence has some short comings. That's why you should evaluate Crystal Reports in a second instance:

  • One of the major differentiators between Crystal Reports and all the other frontend tools is Conditional Formatting. As you may know Crystal Reports has a powerful formula language integrated. This formula language can be used to control neary every property you can set in Crystal Reports. This way you can implement what I call "guided interactivity" at its best: Let the end user choose some parameter values and use these values to control both, the data in the report but especially the layout too. The typical use here is: A customer wants to build 10 similar reports. They are not exactly same regarding the layout, but similar. For example, in Webi there is no straight forward way to show conditionally show or hide some parts of the report. In Crystal Reports such a thing is a no-brainer.
  • Interactive / proactive Alerts: As of today, only Crystal Reports based alerts can be used to send an email notification if they are triggered.
  • Export formats: Crystal Reports has a multitude of available export formats, including Word or XML, which aren't available in any of the other tools.
  • Hierarchical Grouping for relational data sources: Crystal Reports can dynamically resolve a Child-Id-to-Parent-Id relationship and apply calculations over such a hierarchy.

But before you choose Crystal Reports remember there are two versions of Crystal Reports: The legacy Crystal Reports 2011 and Crystal Reports for Enterprise. The first one is mature and stable, but does not contain new features introduced only to CR4Ent. On the other hand, CR4Ent is a de facto "1.x" product regarding its code maturity. For now I simply cannot recommend to use it as your major reporting tool without intensive testing of your own use cases in your environment. On the other hand – depending on your situation – the legacy Crystal Reports does not support UNX universes at all nor does it support UNV universes as you'd expect it coming from Webi.

What about all the other tools? I call them "niche tools". This is due to the fact that all of them have quite a narrow scope of application compared to the "generalists" Webi and Crystal, let me name a few:

  • SAP Visual Intelligence: This is a great tool for ad-hoc-analysis. But that's it. No way (yet) to publish documents online (except over Explorer), schedule them or create more sophisticated standard reports.
  • Explorer: Not the most mature product, especilly in the context of SAP BW and BWA as a datasouce… In general, Explorer is nice for "standard" visualizations. But have you ever tried to customize even basic elements of these charts? Or have you tried to add a simple table into an Exploration View? Or export an Exploration View as a whole? As of today these basic things seem to be impossible…
  • Analysis, Edition for OLAP: Limited to OLAP data sources, no clever integration into scheduling, publishing etc.
  • Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office: Only BW support…
  • Dashboards / Xcelsius: Limited capabilities in terms of data volume that can be processed, no straight forward way to realize drill downs, no common export formats, no full Universe support, no scheduling capabilities…
  • Design Studio: Not usable for productive environements in the current version 1.0, and even for subsequent versions I'm very sceptical… In addition the scope of the tool is focused on BI App development which as such is clearly a niche.

This doesn't mean that these tools are not valuable in the context of specific requirements. But assuming that there is a value in reducing the number of used and supported tools to a minimum, these tools should be chosen only after having evaluated Webi and Crystal beforehand. According to my experience chances are quite high that your requirements can be covered by one of these two tools.

What is your experience with tool selection? Would you agree with my rule of thumb? Anything I missed? Looking forward to reading your comments!

Hi everybody

As you may know I'm a great fan of Cloudshare, you'll find my previous post about testing in the cloud here. So far we had to use "traditional" databases like SQL Server or Oracle to work in Cloudshare. Finally SAP managed to get its new baby – HANA – to various cloud platforms, including Cloudshare –> see here for an overview. They provide you with a regular Cloudshare environment with 24GB RAM with two machines, the HANA server on Linux and a Win7 client with HANA Studio – you can register for the 30 day trial sponsored by SAP here:

01_Environment

So far so good. But what is the value of an isolated HANA database? It's pretty small. Usually in Cloudshare, an "environment" is quite isolated network wise, therefore my first idea was to extend the 24GB RAM and add another machine, e.g. with BO4 installed. Unfortunately the maximum RAM per environment is 32GB. Even more sad that BO4 doesn't really work with 8GB of RAM… What to do? A first inquiry with Cloudshare showed that obviously the HANA environment is somewhat special. After some try and error I found how you can easily connect to your HANA environment both from your local client or another Cloudshare environment. Let me share my findings with you in this blog. As you can read in the title I plan some other posts, especially about how to fill data into HANA using SAP BO Data Services.

First thing we need to do is creating a static vanity URL for the Cloudshare machine. For this switch from "My environments" to "My Account". There go to "Vanity URLs" and specify whatever you want – the only thing you can't take anymore is hana 😉

02_VanityURL

As you can see, there are two public URLs available now: the regular with .cld.sr and a second one vm.cld.sr. In the background these two URLs are mapped to different public IPs. Whereas the first one gives you the default access to ports like 80, 8080 etc. the second one seems to redirect also HANA specific ports like 30015. Therefore you don't need any kind of port forwarding as suggested in forum threads like here. Don't forget to click "Save changes" at the end of the page.

You can now do a first test within the HANA Studio on Cloudshare itself – add a new system and use <your-name>.vm.cld.sr:

03_AddSystem1 04_AddSystem2

05_AddSystem3 06_AddSystem4

As you can see in the last screenshot, the only "issue" with the connectivity is, that somehow the status information of the HANA server cannot be retrieved, therefore you don't get the green light but a yellow one. But don't worry, everything works fine.

The next and so far final part is to connect from another Cloudshare environment, e.g. using the Information Design Tool:

Create a new relational connection using the HANA JDBC driver:

07_AddConnection1 08_AddConnection2

And finally you can start to build your data foundation based on this connection:

09_CreateDF

Hope this helps. Wish you a lot of fun playing around with HANA on cloudshare!

I've just noticed a problem with our IT-Logix Migration Assessment Environment. The problem is with eFashion and other MS Access based demo databases, namely that you get the following error in (online) Webi, both on BO 4.0 SP02 as well as with FP3 – due to 64bit connectivity problems:

You don't get the error in Webi Rich Client usually. In this post I will quickly outline the reasons for this and how to solve it:

First of all: Others got these errors too:

http://scn.sap.com/thread/2118132

http://scn.sap.com/thread/2043784

The answers from SAP (namely http://scn.sap.com/people/henry.banks) are not really satisfying. Of course it is not very clever to use Access as a demo datasource – but why SAP then provides these (access based) samples in BO 4.0 and not e.g. within the database they include within the setup? Anyway, there are three options you can choose:

  1. Move your efashion and other MS Access databases to a "real" database like SQL Server (Express), MySQL etc. It must be just accessible by 32 AND 64 bit drivers.
  2. Migrate to BO4 FP3 – and read the rest of the blog of how you can get Access databases running…
  3. If you are on BO4 SP2 – sorry, I don't know a way how to get Access running on a 64bit driver – if you are interested in the reason, read on… (If you know another solution, please post a comment!)

In BO 4.0 still all the client tools (like the Webi Rich Client) use 32bit drivers. Regarding eFashion this is not a problem as any default Windows XP / 7 / Server will provide preinstalled drivers. The BOE setup will automatically create the corresponding 32bit-ODBC datasources. Therefore you're all fine.

On server side it is important to note that e.g. Webi Processing Server always uses 64bit drivers. As far as I can overlook it as well for MS Access. But these 64bit drivers seem not to be installed by default, at least they weren't on my cloudshare.com environments. In addition there is a strange thing that the BOE setup creates both, 32bit as well as 64bit ODBC connections for eFashion and club.The below screenshot shows the 64bit ODBC Admin (trust me 🙂

But be careful: Whereas the 32bit ODBC connections work fine at least on my side I got the following errors when I wanted to modify e.g. the efashion connection:

If you want to create a new ODBC connection you will notify there are no 64bit drivers installed for MS Access:

My suggestion to solve this is to go here and download the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable – because there is a 64bit setup / drivers for this:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255

Download the 64bit setup… and run it:

Finally your 64bit ODBC Admin "Add connection" dialog should look like this:

Now you can create the efashion, efashion-webi etc. data sources. Make sure you write it absolutely identical as it is written in the 32bit ODBC connection!

So far everything works fine for both, BO 4.0 SP02 as well as FP3. As usual there is a big BUT: You will still get the same errors shown right at the beginning of this post. Remember, you just installed the Access 2010 redistributable. This means you have to change your universe connection to use the appropriate driver (for this log in to Universe Design Tool and choose Tools – Connections). And here is, where at least I had to say there is no (obvious) way of how to solve it with SP02:

Sorry guys, no Access 2010 support in BO 4.0 SP02. But at least FP3 provides something for us:

And finally it should work. To sum up:

  1. On a BO 4.0 FP3 server install MS Access 2010 Redistributable 64bit
  2. Create necessary 64bit ODBC connection
  3. Modify your universe connections to point to the Access2010 driver
  4. have fun with efashion 😉

PS: I don't have any issues with our BO 4.0 SP02 environment which has SP02 installed only as a Patch. We installed this environment during ramp-up for SP02 (in these times Webi was still labeled Interactive Analysis, that's why I noticed the difference…) and only later applied SP02. I didn't investigate, but it seems like Webi Proc servers uses 32bit drivers here… (no 64bit drivers for access installed on this system…)

PPS: Don't have FP3 available but you 'd like to test yourself? I can get you easily access to copy on cloudshare.com – see the corresponding blog post.

Do you have similar experiences? Any other hint I missed? Please post your comment.