BO BI Upgrade Strategy

[saurabh_raheja]

Introduction :

This document will tell briefly about what all things we need to know to upgrade BO environment from BOXI 3.1 to BO 4.1 and migrate Crystal reports from 2008 to 2013.This BO upgradation involves migrating the contents like Web Intelligence Reports, Desktop Intelligence Reports and Crystal Reports.

Installation Configuration for BO BI 4.1 platform

• Only 64-bit Operating systems are supported
• RAM should be minimum 8GB or more
• Minimum Server Cores are 4
• Disk Space should be 15 GB and above.
• Java version is 6 and above
• Windows Installer is 3.5 and above.
• Microsoft .NET Framework is 3.5 SP1 and above.

Benefits of BO BI 4.1 platform

Unified and Highly Personalized

• Improved usability for all the BI suite applications.
• Deliver information to users when and where they need it.
• Involved with all analytic extensions which creates custom experiences.

Powerful Visualizations

• Organize your business with specialized charting
• Empower end users with visualizations
• Discover areas to optimize business

Faster more Accurate Decisions

• Create BI contents from any mobile device
• Teams  can now  deliver efficient decisions
• Simplified deployment to utilize time

Scale & Power

• Less response time irrespective of data volume
• Improved usability to build any BI applications
• Integrate with lifecycle management of SAP.

Speed to Deliver

• Enhanced design experience with latest creation wizard
• Automated universe deployment
• Improved WebI report design

Migration Plan

• Migrated Reports from BOXI 3.1 Prod to BO 4.1 Dev
• Planning Done By Testing Team

          Generation of Test Cases on the basis of which reports wererun. Reports were tested and issues were logged. Estimated the efforts required

• Issue Analysis & Remediation

               Remediation team analyze and fix the issues in BO 4.1 Dev

• Testing/Remediation team

              Proper knowledge transfer and learning are shared with admin team

• Admin team

               They migrates the reports from BO 4.1 Dev to QA

• Application teams

         They perform UAT  and consults remediation team

• Go Live : Migrated reports from BO 4.1 QA to Prod   

Upgrade

Phased Approach

This approach enables User/Administrator to select the BI Content to be migrated from Source deployment to new BO 4.1 deployment. Only selected Objects will be copied to the new deployment.

This approach is effective in case of big migration.

Pros

• Upgrade content in stages
• Issues affect only the LOB upgraded
• Short downtime

Cons

• 2 systems to maintain
• Requires lockdown of Particular LOB folder

Some Useful Tools in BO landscape

Repository Diagnostic Tool (RDT)

It helps to scan for Object to file inconsistencies.

RDT provides diagnosis and repair functionalities.

Life-Cycle manager(LCM)

Migrate the content of a BI repository to another repository within the same version.

Provides Version control.

Allows to use the scripting to automate the import of objects.

Roll back to a previous stable version incase of failure.

Server Monitoring Tool

Ability to capture the runtime and historical metrics of Business Objects servers and applications.

Ensures the reporting environment is functioning normally.

Help in identifying potential problems before they occur.

Upgrade Management Tool(UMT)

Upgrade the content of BI repository from a previous version (BO XI 3.1) of SAP BO.

Can perform Complete or incremental upgrade.

Compete Upgrade upgrades all content at once

Incremental Upgrade upgrades the content in stages

Report Conversion Tool(RCT)

Migrates Desktop Intelligence reports  to  Web Intelligence (WID) format.

It publishes the converted reports to the CMS.

Auditing Tool

Helps in better understanding of the users accessing the system and the documents they are interacting with.

Estimation (Complete Migration)

The project effort that was estimated initially was different from that was actually required. During the project, it was brought to knowledge that more effort

would be needed. Therefore, effort was increased and we were able to resolve issues on time meeting the required timelines. Effort is calculated based on the

below formula.

Total Effort Calculation per report = (No of persons* No of working days in a month*Overall Duration in months)/No of reports

Not all the reports were converted successfully while migration. Therefore we calculated conversion success rate for the reports as per below formula.

Conversion Success Rate =(Total No of reports-Reports in which defects encountered)/Total No of reports.

Issues faced and Remediation applied are listed below

Data Trimming(Webi)	In BOXI 3.1 Data/Text was coming perfectly for the cell but after migrating the report from BOXI 3.1 to BO 4.1 data/text got trimmed. Therefore, remediation applied is adjusted the width and height of cell in BO 4.1 Dev environment
Data Alignment(Webi)	Similarly for data alignment we have to adjust the cell padding (left and right) in BO 4.1 Dev environment to get final output inline with BOXI 3.1 environment.
Data missing/mismatch(Tab Switching issue)(Webi)	There was some mismatch of data or some issues regarding data missing was also encountered. This is the Alerter issue. Therefore, we changed all the alerter default values to some value , and the issue was resolved.
PDF export Issue(Data Missing)(Webi)	Issue -> Reports with different tabs were having data of only first tab getting exported to pdf. Resolution à Visit each tab of the report and purge the data. Export report to get the required data.
Scale Error(Webi charts)	Scaling of some webi charts was different after the migration of report.Therefore, in order to resolve this issue we change the Tick Density of Y axis from automatic to fixed value in BO 4.1 dev environment.

Overlapping of coordinate legends(Webi Charts)	In BO 4.1 Dev, some webi charts have coordinate legends that get overlapped.This issue is resolved by Right click the chart .Click Format chart -> Data series and select Data position to outside.
Scheduling Error(Admin Perspective)(Webi)	This error came up when the reports are huge due to less memory cache. So to remediate such errors memory cache is increased and reports are scheduled .
Font Difference(Deski & Webi Charts)	This issue is a rendering issue of Avenier Next Font. Only Visualization was different.
Cascading LOV’s Issue(Webi)	This issue is resolved by making changes at the universe level. Cascading LOVs is created by using the objects of the universe and the same will be prompted while generating the Webi report.
Font Difference PDF Export(Crystal Reports)	This is the only issue observed in Crystal reports and it is due to resolution difference in the 2 versions.
#Syntax Error(Webi)	This issue came up because the data provider name was matching the variable name and hence that variable was not getting migrated. Therefore, Changed the variable name in BOXI 3.1 Production environment and requested application team to re migrated the report

Learnings and Best Practices for Upgrade

•Choose autofit width to cell contents wherever possible (WebI).

•Do not create variables with same name as that of the dataprovider (WebI).

•Alerters with default values does not seem to work properly in Webi 4.1

•Cascading LOV’s in Webi does not work, have to be created manually in the universe.

•Crystal Reports is a very stable platform. Very less no. of defects

•Crystal reports font issues due to resolution difference.

•Deski converted to Webi have rendering issue with Avenir Next Font after upgarde.

Please do share your comments and feedback.

Regards,

Saurabh