A    Converting Desktop Intelligence Reports to Web Intelligence Documents

You can convert Desktop Intelligence documents from SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.x or XI R2 to Web Intelligence to be used in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2. Follow this checklist of best practices for a methodical conversion that produces a highly functioning series of Web Intelligence documents that were once Desktop Intelligence documents.

Now that Desktop Intelligence has reached its end-of-life stage with the release of the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, the conversion of Desktop Intelligence documents to Web Intelligence is an important topic for customers still using the classic desktop reporting tool. As the product known to many as the original SAP BusinessObjects full-client reporting tool, Desktop Intelligence offered advanced functional capabilities that set it apart from other reporting tools in the market. Many of these were so valuable to business users that many clients opted to continue to use the product.

In fact, even when its successor, Web Intelligence, began to receive an influx of enhancements and improved functionality, many customers found it difficult to trade in the classic desktop client for its zero-client reporting tool successor. Functional differences and the pervasiveness of locally saved documents have continually been cited as leading reasons for continued use of Desktop Intelligence.

By offering a greatly enhanced product that far exceeds the capabilities delivered in Desktop Intelligence, Web Intelligence has made a big leap in minimizing the functional differences between the two products. But even with all the enhancements, there are still capabilities in the last version of Desktop Intelligence that aren’t yet available in Web Intelligence, such as custom VBA code, and the capability to export a report to HTML. These features and a few others can present challenges in migration and conversion efforts when upgrading from previous releases.

A.1    Planning Your Conversion to Web Intelligence

This section focuses on the major steps in performing a successful conversion from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence. The conversion process checklist contains nine general key steps for completing an effective report conversion from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence.

Conversion Checklist: Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence

The conversion checklist is as follows:

The steps outlined in the checklist describe general best practices for any Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence conversion project. The Report Conversion Tool is used to perform these types of conversions. It’s important to know that even though a tool exists specifically for performing conversions, almost every conversion will require some level of manual rework to achieve 100% success.

A.1.1    Analyze Existing Desktop Intelligence Document Usage

Before you create an in-depth conversion plan or rely on a cookie-cutter roadmap to conversion, it’s critical to understand what you’re dealing with in terms of Desktop Intelligence document existence and usage. We recommend that you perform a comprehensive review of the reporting documents published to the repository to begin creating an inventory of Desktop Intelligence documents currently in use.

You can determine actual usage by enabling auditing in the source system to audit the events of the Desktop Intelligence application. Usage statistics are a very powerful indicator of the value of a document. Because Web Intelligence, and not Desktop Intelligence, is the recommended tool, it’s possible that many Desktop Intelligence documents in production have a very small viewership and can be consolidated or eliminated rather than converted. On the other hand, you may discover that a number of published Desktop Intelligence documents are still frequently viewed by business users and very valuable to organizations. The priority to convert these documents to Web Intelligence is high.

The goal of this step is to determine the number of high-value and high-visibility documents to convert to Web Intelligence. It’s also important to determine which documents can be eliminated. Take this opportunity to perform some cleanup before attempting to convert every Desktop Intelligence document to Web Intelligence.

Note

The number of existing Desktop Intelligence documents is an important statistic to the system administrator. The number of Web Intelligence services will likely need to be increased to accommodate the increased number of Web Intelligence documents after conversion.

A.1.2    Identify Users with Desktop Intelligence Installed

Over the course of the past several years, Desktop Intelligence may have been installed on several hundred or even several thousand PCs, depending on the size of the organization. Inevitably, each user will have a number of Desktop Intelligence documents saved locally.

Even though all important documents should exist on the server, to comply with most corporate policies, some documents may exist locally. This is often the case simply because the tool lends itself to working offline and provides the capability of storing .rep files locally.

A.1.3    Publish Locally Saved Desktop Intelligence Documents to the Repository

After you’ve identified the users and report developers who are still using Desktop Intelligence, ask them to publish all important personal and locally saved Desktop Intelligence documents into the BI platform repository. This step puts potentially valuable documents onto the repository so that the migration team can review, analyze, and convert them to Web Intelligence.

It’s important to get every useful Desktop Intelligence documents published to the repository so they can be converted to Web Intelligence and be used in the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 system after migration. Insist that your users make every effort to only retain necessary documents to minimize the buildup of unneeded or duplicate ones.

A.1.4    Prioritize, Consolidate, and Eliminate

Before converting every single Desktop Intelligence document ever created at your organization, take this opportunity to archive or completely eliminate documents that are no longer being used. As companies evolve and data sources change, it’s likely that a large number of locally saved Desktop Intelligence documents are no longer needed. You’ll recognize the distinction between ad hoc documents and valuable documents that are used by business users.

When you’re prioritizing reports, create categories or buckets to differentiate documents based on the frequency of use and the visibility of the data presented in the documents.

A.1.5    Customize the Conversion Plan and Roadmap

After completing the first four steps, you’ll understand the scope of the project and conversion effort. The volume of documents to be migrated plays a major role in developing the roadmap and conversion plan. There are two common approaches to conversion:

The decision regarding which approach to select depends on the following factors:

When you’re preparing the conversion plan, you should also determine document complexity. The difficulty level of conversion can be anticipated after evaluating the Desktop Intelligence documents in the source environment.

These scenarios provide the greatest opportunity to create a small number of new universes that can be used by a much larger number of Desktop Intelligence documents; therefore, these universes should include several objects and predefined filters to increase their usefulness.

Depending on the practices of Desktop Intelligence documents designers, it’s possible that you’ll need to manually create some documents in Web Intelligence. These reports should be identified and placed into their own groups. These are the most common reasons for known conversion problems:

Documents with any of these features should be manually revised before converting.

A.1.6    Perform Document Conversion

You can help stay on track by setting milestones and timelines. Customizing a project timeline will help guide you through the conversion process and ensure that every aspect of the conversion is completed and in the correct order.

Other critical decisions must be made and conveyed to users, such as the following:

Launch the Report Conversion Tool as an administrator and perform the type of conversion:

Even if it is possible to convert XI 3.1 Desktop Intelligence documents with the XI 3.1 Report Conversion Tool and then migrate them into the BI platform repository 4.2, it is rather recommended to use the latest version of the Report Conversion Tool (SAP BI BusinessObjects 4.2 SP 4) to take advantage of the latest conversion features and convert a greater number of documents.

The Report Conversion Tool workflow is described in Section A.2.

A.1.7    Execute Post-Conversion Analysis and Validation

After completing a conversion, documents are grouped into three categories:

The seventh conversion step leads you to performing a post-conversion analysis. Partially converted documents can be evaluated to determine the reason that it wasn’t fully converted. In many cases, minor manual modifications can be made to fully convert documents. This can be a labor-intensive exercise depending on the volume of partially converted documents.

Perform validation on reports that were fully converted. Verify that all data sources, formulas, and report functions continue to work properly in Web Intelligence as they did in Desktop Intelligence.

You need to identify the reason that partially converted documents weren’t fully completed by reviewing log files. In many cases, these documents can be quickly edited. In other cases, it can be easier to re-create partially converted documents in Web Intelligence rather than making the necessary corrections.

Documents that aren’t converted will often need even more manual corrections or will need to be re-created in Web Intelligence rather than converted with the Report Conversion Tool.

A.1.8    Manually Create Unconverted Documents

As mentioned in the seventh step, it’s common that unconverted documents will need to be manually re-created in Web Intelligence if resources permit. Even though Web Intelligence now contains almost all of the function capabilities of Desktop Intelligence, a number of features will still cause Desktop Intelligence documents to not be converted.

You should create a focused strategy for handling reports that remain unconverted even after running them through the Report Conversion Tool. It’s possible that the reason documents aren’t converted can be removed or modified. After making changes, run the Report Conversion Tool again for a second attempt at converting the Desktop Intelligence documents to Web Intelligence.

A.1.9    Educate Users on Web Intelligence

Invest in user training for all users and report designers who will be using Web Intelligence. Training comes in many different forms, including text books, blogs, webinars, e-learning sessions, and official training from SAP and from vendors specializing in providing SAP BusinessObjects training.

We recommend the following resources for learning Web Intelligence:
Countries User Group Website
United States of America and Canada ASUG (Americas’ SAP Users’ Group) www.ASUG.com
Germany, Austria, Switzerland DSAG (Deutschprachige SAP Anwendergruppe) www.dsag.de
France and French speaking countries USF (Utilisateurs SAP Francophone) www.usf.fr
United Kingdom, Ireland UKISUG (UK & Ireland
SAP User Group) 		http://www.sapusers.org
Netherlands VNSG (Vereniging Nederlandstalige SAP Gebruikers) http://www.vnsg.nl

Table A.1    Some SAP User Groups