BusinessObjects Administration - Content Management Procedure

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Continuing with introduction to Content Management Plan http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform/blog/2014/01/06/businessobjects-administration--content-man...  I would like to explain step by step procedure involved in the Content management process in this blog which has been partially replicated from my old blog here http://blogs.hexaware.com/business-objects-boogle/business-objects-content-management-planning/

Architecturally there were lot of changes starting from BusinessObjects version XI. Compared to earlier BusinessObjects versions (Legacy architecture till version 6.5) which is user centric, From XI onwards it’s Object centric. i.e. things revolve around Objects (BI content) as compared to users in legacy versions. Again these BI contents (Universe, Reports) will be organised using folders.

Throughout this blog I am going to use Marketing, Finance and HR as different departments of the organization and Refresher and Author as functional roles of users. Let us start our content management process from here.

1. Organizing BI contents by folders

To begin with, we need to consolidate Universes, Reports and even users in a hierarchical manner using folders. This will help both system administrators and end users to use the system effectively with minimal or no training. In most of the cases top level folders will represent either departments of the organization or Geographic regional categorization followed by departmental split. It is up to the organization’s choice to decide their folder hierarchy. Here is my sample categorization.

2. Organize User groups/Users as per organization preference

Now we need to group the users in a best possible way to apply security on top of the folders organized above. In most of the cases users will be categorized department wise, User role wise or intersection of both of them preferably in line with the folder hierarchy.

3. Identify required access levels for each user category

Now it’s time to identify who need access to what. As part of this we will be identifying set of rights needed for each user categorization. For each user category or departmental folder we will be creating a separate access level based on the access for user to the required folder.

4. Setting up security

Finally the security applied for each departmental folder would be something similar to this.

5. Organizing objects using categories for flexible access

We can utilize categories to provide access to users who needs right to use BI contents from two or more departments. For example the summary report will be maintained for each department/Region is used by the Finance team for the monthly processing. Though this report is maintained in each department’s folder we can create a category to tag all the summary reports and access them from one place. This is depicted below

Reports with category tagging

Reports in their logical folder path

6. Managing report object instances within each department folders

It is always important to manage instances along with its original reports as this has a very big impact with File store size. By defining proper instance management plan we can manage report instances either based on their age or number. Refer here to know more about instance management plan BusinessObjects Instance Management

Hope this would be helpful for those who start designing BusinessObjects Content management plan.