BI Upgrade & Migration - Top Online Resources

A Guided Tour

(webinar recording)

Henry kicked off the 2015 Webinar Series with a guided tour of the most important sites, highlighting links to many must-know assets.

• Introduction
• SAP BI Microsite: 1:55
• SAP Support Portal and Service Market Place: 07:18
• SCN Community Forum: 12:55
• Wiki Area of SCN: 41:04
• Q&A: 49:08

The section below is a list of all these links and sites.

SAP BI Micro Site

www.sapbi.com

Our BI Micro Site contains a number of great resources, spread across a number of tabs.

Front Page

• BI Competency Centre assessment
  A topic that comes up so often before (and during) projects: Are we truly ready for the upgrade? A first step is to implement a BI Competency Center (BICC).
  Got one already? Take the assessment to identify areas where there's room for optimization; topics covered include funding, reporting etc.

Tab: BI Champion

Tab: Strategy

• Design-thinking methodology
  Deliver projects that your audience desires, with ideas & needs from decision-makers.
• Statement of Direction
  Learn where SAP's BI Solutions are heading.
• BI Convergence strategy
  Jayne Landry covers SAP's BI roadmap and describes the strategic planing for our BI clients.

This tab includes links to surveys andquestionnaires that help you assess your strengths and opportunities.

• “Take a Strategy assessment” to discover and prioritize business challenges across your organization.

Tab: Implement

Tab: Upgrade

• “Get a custom Implementation report”
  Identify key technical touch points to consider, like virtualization, protocols, authentication and more. The personalized report is a sound basis to gauge where you are at and need to go next.

• “Get a custom Upgrade report”
  This report is a huge help for planning major milestones of a project. As such, it is mostly targeted at Project Management.

Support Portal

http://support.sap.com

The Support Portal has been simplified and re-desgined for easier navigation.

Here you report incidents and manage your remote connections for SAP Support to help you.

Highlights of the SAP Support Portal:

• Documentation - http://help.sap.com
  This is one of the most overlooked and yet most helpful resources! Navigate down to the Analytics tab, and under Business Intelligence you'll find all our BI products.
  
  
• Knowledge Base & Articles -http://support.sap.com/notes
  When facing issues, one of the the first entry points for you should be the notes search. A wealth of information that helps you trouble shooting and investigation. Search by criteria like subject matter, release, patch information etc. The search results include links to solutions, related downloads and more.
  
  These knowledge base articles address questions we often get asked:
  • KBA 1909881: How to upgrade from one version of BI4 to another
  • KBA 1934748: Is a full installation required when updating BI4.x installations?
  • KBA 1882363: Upgrading and multiple CMS database/Nodes leading to CMS database corruption, missing Application Settings/rights/icons/??dummy placeholders and more
  • KBA 2013616: How to patch BI 4.x servers in a distributed BI Platform deployment simultaneously ( in parallel ) ?
  • KBA 1949693: AdaptiveProcessingServer Running with errors after installing BI 4.1 or after upgrade to BI 4.1
  • KBA 1987825: The APS status is "Running with errors" after upgrading to BI 4.1 SP2
  • KBA 1982241: Tomcat does not start in BI 4.1

• Remote support - Remote Support | SAP Support Portal
  A prerequisite for our support engineering and experts on demand to help you investigating any issues.
  • Remote Supportability chose the right technology, includes links to downloads and detailed information.
  • Remote Connection types helps you select and setup the remote connection type that most appropriately serves any particular situation.

• Roadmaps / Release and upgrade information - https://support.sap.com/release-upgrade-maintenance.html
  • Roadmaps - Includes Product and Solution Roadmaps as well as Implementation Roadmaps (ASAP)
  • Maintenance schedules - Learn about upcoming, planned releases for Support Packages and SP Stacks.
  • Product Compatibility Matrix - compatibility between components (aka PAM)
    Details about SAP software product versions, including availability, end of maintenance, upgrade paths, and technical release information (database platforms, Java platforms, operating systems, and so on).

SAP Community Network (SCN)

https://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform

The place where SAP experts meet, share experience and knowledge and help each other. Meant for customers, partners, subject matter experts, curious individuals and SAP employees.

Highlights on SCN and recommend to our customers:

• The Events Page shows you what webinars are planned and is updated with links to recordings of past webinars. A great page to 'receive email notifications' for to not miss any updates.

• ThePlanning your upgrade is fine landing page and great for getting a first glance of what to consider.

• Size matters, and these resources are most important for this crucial topic:
  • Sizing Microsite for primary sizing and performance tips for BI and Lumira, with heaps of additional links.
  • BI 4 Sizing Guide for services by Ian Treleaven with best practices and recommendations.
  • BI4 Sizing and Deployment Guide by Bill Lang. Crucial, will also be covered in webinars.

• Performance Improvements
  • In his publications, James Rapp describes how the user experience can be improved by using Apache in conjunction with the WDeploy web application deployment tool, for BI 4.1 and BI 4.0
  • the Best Practices for SAPBO BI 4.0 Adaptive Processing Servers by Jan De Vilder is handy summary for an administrator familiar with the BI platform and references other related resources.

• Sample Auditing universes and Reports
  Radim Bacinschi offers a starting point for developing your custom auditing universe and reports.

• Best Practices for Virtualizing BI 4.x on VMware is a technical white paper by Ashish Morzaria and focuses on validating SAP's recommendations for deploying BI 4 systems in virtual environments.

• Interactive Diagrams and Process Flows, updated by Tomasz Zima, are found on the Tutorials Landing page (sap.com/LearnBI).

• Choosing the right client tool
  Blair Wheadon offers decision support in the context of business problems that are to be addressed.

• Timeouts in the BI Platform across various processing tiers.
  Janos Nagy explains how to manage timeouts, covering main settings, notes, and best practices.

• Best practices for backing up the CMS and Audit DB
  Jose Ramos's blog is relevant if you are using BI 4.1 and your CMS and Audit databases are on SQL Anywhere.

• Overview of SSO options on BI
  Greg Wcislo summarizes various SSO options, from authenticating to BI, all the way down to the database.

• Updating the JRE/JDK for Tomcat
  Ajay Gupta's blog is a great example of a community member covering a third party components.

• Moving from DeskI to WebI?
  Merlijn Ekkel describes how to convert DeskI content for use in WebI (webinar).

• WebI Tuning Tips
  On WebI already? Jonathan Brown covers report design, semantic layer choice and much more.

• WebI Performance Tuning Tips (SAP BW)
  A step-by-step guide by Kurt Holst, making use of BI Consumer Services Connection (BICS).

• WebI Calculation Engine Changes
  A deep dive into changes in the calculation engine by Gregory Botticchio and  Pascal Gaulin (webinar)

• Setting up Introscope for Advanced Monitoring
  Toby Johnston describes how to setup extended monitoring capabilities of the BI platform.

• Branding and Theming of BI Launchpad
  Christina Obry covers how you can incorporate company logos and color with the help of CSS templates.

• Multi Tenancy Best Practices for BI Platform
  Learn how to quickly onboard new LOB's or companies, and how to manage new tenants in an SAAS concept.

• Data Federation Admin Tool - What it is, How it works and When to use it
  This blog by Sonet Kebede helps you joining data from various sources into a multi-source Universe.

• Cluster Patching Guide
  Step-by-step instructions for Parallel Patching, to reduce effort and time spent in multi node deployments.
  
  

SCN - Wiki

The SCN Wiki is a subset of the community network and contains actively maintained pages, with much content from our support team.

Highlights on the SCN Wiki:

• Pattern Books:'You can't go worong with a pattern book', as Henry says
  These step-by-step guides complement the standard documentation with check lists, workflows and more.

• BI Platform Support Tool
  A tool designed for supporting many aspects of the BI Platform and for simplifying the process of reporting on the landscape configuration, performing root cause analysis tasks, and delivering performance optimization and go-live services. It is used used by support engineers, consultants and administrators.

• Universe conversion - Moving from UNVs to UNXs
  This article describes the conversion of XI3.1 relational universe (UNV) to BI4.0 relational universe (UNX).

• Feature Comparison: WebI and DeskI
  This page contains a very comprehensive feature comparison for WebI and DeskI.

• Promotion Management
  This troubleshooting blog by Matthew Shaw includes best practices for design and implementation and includes videos.

• WebI GUI customisation
  Customize the GUI on a per user or per folder base: hide/disable elements, simply interfaces. By Jason Everly.

• Performance Tuning for WebI Applet Interface 
  Jonathan Brown's tips & tricks for tuning the Java based designer/viewer found within the BI Launchpad.

• WebI Automatic Calculation rewrite
  This page complements the above listed SCN document on the changes of Calculation Engine, is authored by Carly Thomas and David Francois Gonzalez.

• Configuring the Connection of BI to BW, through the Information Design Tool
  A great article targeting the BW basis and the BI administrators, by Jacqueline Rahn and Bryan Booth.