I've gone through quite a few best practices documents for upgrading from SAP BO 3.x to 4.x but the answers to the following questions still elude me. We are looking at the upgrade from a content developers' (Webi/Universe designers') perspective. The backend system is SAP BW. We are considering moving to BICS post upgrade. But before a decision is made, a few questions need closure.
1. In the current 3.1 environment, there are a lot of ad hoc reports created by end users. What is the best practice to migrate ad hoc reports?
a. Move the reports "as is" - The reports will continue being based on the universes they were built on. Problems here are : performance considerations, inability to leverage BICS, overhead of universe maintenance (universes are not few in number).
b. Rebuild reports on BICS or move the reports and change data provider to refer to BICS. Problems here are : The mapping feature will not work a hundred percent (because of customizations in the universe - A POC has already been done to verify this), extra time needed to rebuild reports which are not canned.
2. How do we give the end users the ability to leverage BICS to do ad-hoc reporting? The SAP recommendation is to create a single OLAP connection to the entire BW system or to Infocubes. While this offers the ease of maintaining fewer connections (as opposed to the situation where 1 OLAP connection would be created per BEx query), we do not want the users to unnecessarily navigate Infoareas that they may not require/may not be supposed to view. What is the trade off here and is there any best practice for ad hoc reporting over BICS or should we just build universes for ad hoc reporting? Analysis, edition for OLAP is another tool being evaluated for ad-hoc reporting too but the requirement is more of traditional tabular reporting.
Regards,
F
