Experience A Live SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 Upgrade

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Planning on moving
to BI 2025?

Agenda
1 Introduction
2
Top Features in SAP BI 2025
What’s new in BusinessObjects?
3
Why should you upgrade?
And why now?
4
12 steps for a successful migration
to SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025
5
What if we are still in BI 4.2?
Can we migrate directly to BI 2025?

Interactive Dashboards in Webi:
Yes, that’s right! You can now create fully interactive dashboards in Web Intelligence with dynamic
visualizations, new widgets, and a dedicated dashboarding space.
Access your reports anytime, anywhere:
With Web Intelligence Document eXtract (WIDX), export interactive Dashboards to a new offline format—
perfect for on-the-go insights with no extra licenses needed.
Enhanced collaboration:
Distribute interactive Dashboards outside the BI platform so stakeholders can explore and engage with the
data freely, with no extra setup.
Simplified report creation process:
A redesigned, user-friendly interface with data mashup, streamlined interactions and new customization
options make report creation more intuitive.
Improved BI Launchpad capabilities:
Pin key KPIs and charts directly to Launchpad tiles for instant access to critical business insights—faster
and more efficient.
Top Features in SAP BI 2025
Top new features
4

Why should you upgrade to BusinessObjects BI 2025?
SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 brings a host of new features designed to enhance data insights, interactivity,
and usability. This release focuses on improving reporting, analysis, and decision-making for all users,
whether they are business professionals, IT experts, or decision-makers.
● Enhanced Web Intelligence: New dynamic dashboards with interactive widgets allow for customized,
compelling data presentations on both desktop and mobile devices.
● Web Intelligence Document eXtract (WIDX): Enables offline access to interactive dashboards, making
data more accessible even in areas with limited internet connectivity.
● Improved User Experience: An updated interface simplifies report generation, making it intuitive for
both beginners and experts. Features like data mashup and advanced customization options enhance
efficiency and personalization.
● Platform Reliability: Faster access to information and simplified migration paths ensure the platform
meets modern business demands while protecting existing investments.
Overall, SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 is designed to build on past investments, offering enhanced
capabilities for user engagement, efficiency, and data accessibility, positioning businesses to make better
decisions faster.

How should you upgrade to BusinessObjects BI 2025?
SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 is a major version up from BI 4.3, just as 4.3 is from 4.2.
It supports an in-place upgrade from SAP BI 4.3.
However, we recommend performing instead a side-by-side migration.
Practically, that means installing BI 2025 on a new server and migrating the contents from the existing 4.3
installation.
● New Server: Created with latest OS version, Databases, etc.
● Gradual migration: the production environment remains operational until the migration is complete
and validated. An in-place upgrade disables it during the whole process, and the rollback if anything
goes wrong. Clustered environments make it even more complex.
● Proven method: this approach has been used over the years across multiple versions and has proven
reliable. In-place upgrades are sensitive to the existing setup and are fragile.
● New License Key: As a side note, a new license key is required for BI 2025 .

Backup your environment
Step 1
Document all objects
Step 2
Be BI 2025-ready
Step 3
Step 4 Identify unused content
Step 5 Clean up obsolete content
Step 6 Create a baseline for report regression testing
Step 7 Migrate to SAP BI 2025
Step 8 Validate the migration
Step 9 Fix impacted objects
Step 10 Optimize performance
Step 11 Implement backup and Disaster Recovery
Put in place a maintenance strategy
Step 12
to SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025
12 steps for a successful migration

● Before doing anything, it’s highly recommended to take a backup of your entire
platform.
This gives you the possibility to rollback further down the line of the migration in
case you encounter any issues, for example, some objects may be corrupted after a
UNV to UNX conversion.
● 360Suite offers a powerful and flexible backup solution down to the object level.
Backups are incremental and dynamic, and they enable selective rollback to
previous version of objects, such as Personal Documents, Access Levels, Users and
Groups, Universe Connections, etc. at any time.
● Additionally, they allow for the recovery of all deleted objects, including personal
folders, from the 360Suite recycle bin.
Step 1 – Backup your environment

● It’s important to document all objects, including their count, size, scheduling (with
performance details), connections, reports, and Universe. This documentation can
then be used a reference point or a baseline to assess and monitor the migration
process.
● 360Suite allows you to audit your entire environment, helping you understand
your content usage and non-usage to know what content should be migrated and
what can be archived or deleted.
Step 2 – Document all objects

● You must meet the SAP BI 2025 prerequisites before you start this migration
project:
● Convert your UNV
○ Your UNV Universes must be converted to UNX as UNV are not supported
in SAP BI 2025. To convert your universes, repoint your Web Intelligence
documents, test to validate the reports, and monitor migration progress,
follow the steps in our guide on how to convert your UNV to UNX like a
pro.
● Identify your Multi-Source Universes
○ Multi-Source Universes (MSU) in UNX format will not be supported in SAP
BI 2025 so it’s critical you identify and convert them to Single-Source
Universes (SSU).
○ 360Suite offers capabilities to convert your MSU to SSU in just a few simple
steps.
Step 3 – Be BI 2025-ready

● Locate unsupported content
○ SAP announced that certain components will no longer be supported in SAP BI
2025 such as Lumira Discovery, CR4E, Analysis for OLAP, and Live Office.
○ 360Suite will locate the content, make an inventory, and gather information
such as the usage and connections. The content based on usage should then
be recreated to the BI format such as Web Intelligence dashboards, in the new
WIDX format.
Step 3 – Be BI 2025-ready (cont.)

● You must understand what you have in your SAP BusinessObjects environment, in
particular, objects that are never used such as reports and universes.
● Often 60% of an organization’s content hasn’t been used in the past 13 months. You
want to minimize the migration effort by identifying such content that can be
archived or deleted.
● 360Suite provides features allowing a full usage and non-usage audit of your SAP
BusinessObjects environment.
● With these results in hand, you can move to the next step of cleaning up the unused
content.
Step 4 – Identify Unused Content

● Unused content takes up space in your SAP BusinessObjects environment,
creates additional work during the migration process, and increases storage costs
especially when it’s located on the Cloud.
● There are 3 options in 360Suite to remove unused content:
○ Pseudo-archive (hide and isolate the content)
○ Archive outside of SAP BusinessObjects (make sure the content is secured
and in an accessible format)
○ Delete content from platform
Step 5 – Clean up obsolete content

● Create points of reference to which migrated reports can be compared to, for example, on the:
● Data Performance Image
● This will be used in step 8 when validating your SAP BI 2025 migration once your content has
been promoted.
Step 6 – Create a baseline for report regression testing

● Migration projects take time and it’s generally not possible to migrate everything
at once because your platform is live and operational; migrated content needs to
be validated for regression and security.
● Out-of-the-box promotion in SAP BusinessObjects isn’t very flexible and has
limitations when it comes to the amount of content it can move.
● 360Suite offers flexible promotion management by using individual BIAR files and
their dependencies for each object, resulting in faster and easier promotion.
● Promotion can be done in delta mode. Once the initial content is migrated and
while the original platform is still in use, only new or modified content will be
promoted.
Step 7 – Migrate to SAP BI 2025

● Validating the migration through regression testing is critical for both the IT and
Admin teams to prove their work has been performed properly, and for the business
to trust their content was migrated successfully.
● Both the following must be tested against regression:
○ Metadata: Search for missing objects, users, schedules, etc.
○ Reports: Compare reports against the pre-migration baseline to detect
discrepancies on data, formatting and performance.
● Documenting your test results is equally important to prove to your users that the
migration has been validated.
● 360Suite provides automated regression testing to test, compare and validate report
results over time, across environments, and between versions by generating two
instances of the same report with identical filters and/or prompts, highlighting all
differences. You will also have documentation to demonstrate the quality to the
business, auditors, and regulators for complete transparency and accountability.
Step 8 – Validate the migration

● Depending on your regression test results, you might need to fix impacted objects,
in bulk.
● Documentation and Administration features of 360Suite allow such operations with
minimal work.
● 360Suite provides you with documentation of all the impacted objects.
● Once a regression is identified on an object e.g. a broken or invalid variable, impact
analysis will locate other instances of the same object
● Then, bulk updates can be applied.
Step 9 – Fix impacted objects

● There are 3 areas where performance can be optimized:
○ Optimize reports by identifying unused objects and removing them.
○ Optimize reports with long-running queries or that have excessive numbers of
columns or rows.
○ Optimize scheduling by identifying reports with long run times.
360Suite’s report distribution feature enables single pass bursting for shorter
run time and minimized server load.
Step 10 – Optimize performance

● You must implement a Disaster Recovery plan to enable recovery of your SAP
BusinessObjects deployment as of a specific point in time.
Simply copying virtual machines does not constitute a backup strategy as
corrupted objects will also be corrupted in the copy.
● A Disaster Recovery plan using 360Suite will ensure you meet your Recovery Time
Objective (RTO) and less than your Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD).
Our Disaster Recovery solution automates the synchronization between your
production and recovery sites, ensuring the recovery site will seamlessly take over
when needed.
Step 11 – Implement backup and Disaster Recovery

● Implementing a maintenance strategy will keep the environment lean, maintain
high performance, and reduce the time and cost of future upgrades or migrations.
The following should be included in your strategy:
● Archiving and cleanup rules
○ Put in place archiving and cleanup rules to maintain a lean environment. For
example, archive instances at creation time (consider keeping them in PDF
and/or XLSX formats for future compatibility and secure them with a password).
If you have deployed in the Cloud, consider storing archived files to Medium or
Cold storage sites.
● Establish ongoing user recertification
○ Document per Business Unit who has access to what, who logged in or not.
Then archive or remove users that are not logging in to use their content to
meet requirements such as SOC 2.
Step 12 – Put in place a maintenance strategy

● Use past snapshots to run regression tests
○ Use past snapshots to run daily or weekly regression testing and consider
running exception regression testing (running a report against the same data
set to detect discrepancies). This is crucial for a CI/CD process.
● Use 360Suite to automate maintenance and monitor performance. This includes
tracking the run times of scheduled documents and on-demand documents,
such as long-running Webi documents. Validate data providers to ensure data
pushed to Webi is accurate and originates from the correct SQL queries,
adhering to predetermined business rules (such as SOX, HIPAA, and Data ACT
lineage). Additionally, monitor and validate that the ETL processes are extracting
the proper number of rows. Ultimately, this will help you keep a lean
environment, minimize resource waste, and reduce operation and maintenance
costs.
Step 12 – Put in place a maintenance strategy (cont.)

Can we migrate directly to BI 2025?
● Short answer: YES!
● Provided all the prerequisites are met (no UNC, CRE etc.)
● You are in SP06 or above
● The process is identical

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