And it only took around, what, four years?
I’m flicking through the notes I’ve been making for the past half year or so on the XI 3.x version of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, because I’m preparing for the upgrade exam (Wednesday is the big day).
I feel fairly confident that I will pass the exam. I’ve been working with the new version for some time now and have done three migrations, one to 3.0 from 6.5 and two from R2 to 3.1. I must say that I like the new features that are sprinkled around the suite, not to mention quite a few usability enhancement. The CMC, for example, has had a much needed makeover and Web Intelligence has had some really useful enhancements, as well.
It’s not all joy, though. When I said that I’d been working with this version for some time now, I almost added at the expense of my customers, because it’s also still quite buggy (especially 3.0). This in combination with flaky support can be a cause for major headaches. It has definitely strengthened my belief that implementations should not be done in the field until the first Service Pack is out.
I was actually prompted to start typing this up because I was reading the following in one of the notes I’d made on auditing.
The auditing features in XI R3 bring the usage reporting capabilities into parity with the features in BusinessObjects Enterprise 5.x/6.x. This eliminates a significant roadblock for customers of 5.x/6.x to migrate to the XI platform.
Around four years ago XI was introduced as the successor of 6.5 and it has taken all this time to arrive where we started. Things have come full circle since then, but the question I guess, at least in my case, is why has it taken this long?