It’s that time of year again. Daylight Savings Time will be occurring for most of us very soon. This blog serves as a friendly reminder for what you should do to prepare based on the version of SAP BusinessObjects you have deployed.
Spring 2014 DST Timeline
March 9 * | Most of North America * |
March 30 * | Most of Europe and UK * |
April 6 | Most of Australia |
No DST | Most of Asia |
Fall 2014 DST Timeline
November 2 | Most of North America |
October 26 | Most of Europe and UK |
October 5 * | Most of Australia * |
No DST | Most of Asia |
* Identifies when majority of issues would be logged with Support. IE when DST time changes forward.
Exact 2014 dates per country can be found here.
In previous years, the DST change has affected the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise product in different ways. There are two main workflows where we have seen issues in the past.
- Report Scheduling
- Web Application Server time
The first, Report Scheduling, has been seen in multiple forms. This ranged anywhere from duplicate scheduled reports, reports running 1 hour early or late, or as we saw last year, thousands of report instances failing over and over for a single parent report.
The second, Web Application Server time, is a generic description for the UI (BI Launchpad, CMC, InfoView, etc) not displaying the correct time for the user which is logged in. In some cases, since the user is detected as being logged in an hour earlier than current time, anything they schedule could be in turn scheduled for an hour earlier than their intended time.
Both SAP Development and SAP Active Global Support teams have completed their internal testing to prepare for DST 2013 and have not found any new regressions in either of the XI3.1 or BI4.0 product lines. Just in case there were any scenarios unaccounted for, please monitor your systems on the days following the time change. Utilize the Instance Manager within the CMC to monitor for report failures and/or schedule timing issues. If you do encounter an issue, please utilize the following kbases where needed and/or create a support ticket in Service MarketPlace.
** NOTE: If using SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1, be sure to have your environment patched up to the minimum patch level otherwise you risk running into the issues many of our customers encountered last year.
SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1
Make sure to have your system patched to:
- XI 3.1 SP3.6 or greater
- XI 3.1 SP4 or greater
- XI 3.1 SP5 or greater
SAP BusinessObjects BI4.x
Does not appear to be affected.
Related SAP Notes:
- SAP Note# 1448881 - Multiple instances spawned after daylight savings time change
This article has the “EDST reschedule tool” attached to the note which was used during the 2011 issues faced last year to reschedule all recurring reports in bulk.
- SAP Note# 1568239 - After DST change Schedules fail in Business Objects Enterprise XI 3.1 with: Object could not be scheduled within the specified time interval
This article references the url for the Oracle Java Time Zone updater tool which can help mitigate issues where the Java Web Application Server is incorrect by an hour.
- SAP Note# 1771416 - Wrong schedule time displayed for recurring reports in Australia timezone. Not necessarily DST related but more of a general time zone issue. Fixed in XI 3.1 SP6.
