Put to the Test: BusinessObjects XI Makes It Easy and Tempting to Upgrade

When I first reviewed BusinessObjects XI last year, I was impressed by improvements in the Web Intelligence query and analysis environment and by the integration of the Crystal Reports architecture. But my reaction for long-time Business Objects customers was lukewarm, as legacy reports were not supported in XI Release 1.

BusinessObjects XI Release 2, introduced late last year, makes it clear that while Web Intelligence may be the environment of the future, the company wants to protect customer investments in existing full-client reports. To that end, these reports run unmodified in XI Release 2. BusinessObjects classic (the tool used to author the full-client reports) has been rebranded Desktop Intelligence, and users now have access to the common InfoView portal, security, scheduling and infrastructure of the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform, which offers greater scalability and performance.

XI Release 2 also brings improvements in Web-based functionality, integrated reporting, migration and administration, cementing the platform's position as one of the strongest products in the business intelligence (BI) market.

Closing the Gap

Despite the pains Business Objects has taken to support full-client reports, many customers have said they will convert them to Web Intelligence to take advantage of Web-based authoring and interactivity. Web Intelligence report consumers can readily right-click against any table to re-sort, filter, drill, remove a column, add a calculation or change the display type of a chart--without launching a full report design environment. The vendor provides a Report Conversion Utility that converts most full-client reports to the Web Intelligence format.

In the past, gaps in functionality between Web Intelligence and the full client limited adoption of Web-based authoring. XI Release 2 changes that. One of the biggest improvements is synchronization of multiple data sources, which lets users create queries against any BusinessObjects universe and OLAP data source and present the results as one seamless cross-tab or chart. Not only can you access data from different sources (such as internal pricing benchmarks and market prices), you can access data at different levels of detail. For example, early adopter Alpha Physicians Resources, which staffs emergency rooms throughout New York and New Jersey, uses this capability to monitor the number of patients treated by a doctor each hour. Multiple data providers are used because patient information is stored at an encounter level of detail, whereas physician hours are monthly. This type of end-user analytic power does not exist in any other Web-based BI product.

Adding Context

Business Objects touts its Encyclopedia, but I'm more impressed with the Web Intelligence Context Panel. Both features offer business users metadata about the report they are viewing. With the Context Panel, report consumers can readily see an object description and how a metric was calculated. When BusinessObjects Data Integrator is part of the deployment, data lineage is also displayed. In the past, such business and technical metadata was only available to report authors, not consumers.

The capabilities of the Encyclopedia go beyond the Context Panel in that users can define business questions that reports can answer and they can create guided analysis that links to multiple reports. The Encyclopedia also offers a glossary of terms, but these must be manually populated. In contrast, the Context Panel is automatically populated from the BusinessObjects universe (the platform's semantic/business metadata layer). In short, the Encyclopedia is a promising tool but requires greater discipline leverage.

Improving Web Intelligence

Web Intelligence has tightly integrated OLAP capabilities with drill through from dynamic microcubes to relational details. It's intuitive functionality for end users, yet there's no administrative overhead (as in requirements to manually link relational and OLAP sources or to prebuild MOLAP databases). Drill-through capabilities have long existed in BusinessObjects' full client, but this is another improvement in Web Intelligence XI Release 2. The vendor also has a history of connectivity to third-party OLAP data sources (including Hyperion Essbase, Microsoft Analysis Services and SAP BW), but the XI Release 2 implementation is significantly improved. A universe can now be built on top of an OLAP data source, and end users gain the full formatting and interactivity capabilities of Web Intelligence, regardless if the data is relational or from an OLAP database.

Still lacking in Web Intelligence is the ability to apply templates to ensure that corporate reports have a consistent format. Also, some of the formatting tasks on the properties tab in the Java Report Panel are daunting (unless you're a developer). The zero-footprint HTML interactive viewer offers more intuitive, Windows-like dialogs but does not have all the capabilities of the Java Report Panel, adding a confusing and unnecessary parity issue. When extensive formatting was applied in the first release of the viewer, browsers tended to hang, but the problem appears to have been corrected in Service Pack 1 (released in March). There are still a few Desktop Intelligence features that aren't yet available in Web Intelligence, but the advantages of Web authoring and interactivity outweigh those shortcomings.

Integrating Reporting

XI Release 1 was a good start in integrating Crystal Reports and BusinessObjects security, servers, portal and repository, but there's still room for improving integration of the metadata layers. For instance, a Crystal Reports author can use the Business Objects universe as a data source, but the query cannot be later modified. XI Release 2 adds a parameter to let Crystal Reports users build queries that contain multiple contexts or star schemas. However, certain Crystal Report capabilities, such as cascading lists of values and view-time security, require business views--the optional metadata layer introduced as part of Crystal Enterprise 10. Ideally, both authoring environments should leverage the same metadata layer.

Easing Administration

While BI has been spreading across the enterprise, enterprise-class administrative tools are still largely lacking. To fill the void, XI Release 2 offers new usage-monitoring capabilities and improvements in deployment. To monitor enterprisewide usage, the upgrade adds an Activity universe and more than a dozen powerful, prebuilt reports. Administrators can control the level of detail monitored, going beyond system load and user login auditing. The resulting report, shown at left, gives you enough information to understand how the system is being used; do users just view reports or are they charting and filtering the data? Such detail ensures the universes truly and reports truly meet user needs.

Many organizations want to isolate development, user testing and production environments. This was theoretically possible in previous BusinessObjects deployments, but moving objects from one environment to another was a manual, error-prone process. XI Release 2 introduces Business Intelligence Application Resource files. Developers can use a BIAR file to specify the contents (universes, documents, users) they wish to promote from test to production. The Import Wizard creates an XML file of the contents that can be integrated with third-party version and control systems.

Streamlining Migration

Upgrading to BusinessObjects XI is straightforward for Crystal Enterprise customers but more complex for BusinessObjects 5x and 6x customers, due primarily to the change in repository architecture and security. A new wizard migrates content from version 5.1.4 and higher to XI Release 2. In multiple test scenarios, the wizard worked as expected. However, customers need to plan for this task.

In particular, political and cultural issues could arise if you're consolidating departmental implementations. In addition, security is much more granular and now object-oriented (rather than user-oriented, as in BusinessObjects 6x and earlier versions). Customers asked for this granularity, but there's a steep learning curve in understanding the impact.

The number of customers moving to XI Release 2 has been surprisingly large, I suspect due in part to the benefits of the upgrade as well as the strength of the migration utilities.

Sizing it Up

Support is an important consideration when BI is mission critical, and this has been the vendor's Achilles' heel. Business Objects has taken a number of steps to address the problem, and customers say the situation is improving.

On the product front, the distinctions between leading BI vendors are increasingly less apparent. Vendors leapfrog each other in certain areas with each new upgrade. The beauty of XI Release 2 is that it puts Business Objects ahead of the pack--at least for now--in providing a broad BI solution while being best of breed for casual users, power users and developers. Among the competitors with recent suite releases, Business Objects has also done the best job of making it easy to migrate to the latest platform.

• Pricing: Set either by named user or by BusinessObjects Enterprise server in two editions, Standard and Premium.

Cindi Howson is the author of Business Objects XI: The Complete Reference. She teaches TDWI's "Evaluating BI Toolsets" and publishes more in-depth reviews at BIScorecard.com. Write to her at [email protected].