SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja
December 20, 2021

SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja

Saurabh Raheja | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform

SAP BO BI Platform can be used for reporting purposes. There are reporting tools available within this suite e.g. Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, etc. These reporting tools help us to develop reports on top of the data available in the database. We can build interactive and beautiful visualizations which help the organization in decision makings. Getting hold of meaningful data in the vast scope of backend data and displaying that in form of interactive reports and visualization help the organization in planning, decision making, and overall growth of the organization. These are the scope of the use case of the SAP BI BO Platform. One can even schedule the reports to get the reports delivered to their email, BI Inbox at any frequency like daily, weekly, monthly, and so on and so forth.
  • Maintaining users and user groups in CMC.
  • Scheduling Web Reports through CMC to get reports delivered to emails at any given frequency.
  • Maintaining roles and securities for different users, users group and BO servers
  • Regarding improvement, there is very little scope now as it has already grown up so well from BO BI 3.1 to BO BI 4.0, then BO BI 4.1, then BO BI 4.2 and now the latest is BO BI 4.3
  • One improvement I can think of is that it can go on the cloud. For example, a physical box may not be required for the installation of SAP BI BO.
  • SAP BO BI Platform has a good positive impact on the overall business of any organization. It helps in important decision making, planning, and analyzing the growth of the particular organization
  • Another positive impact is that users get hold of data very easily and in a user-friendly manner. users can even interact with reports to get the meaningful data filtered out of that.
  • The negative impact can be on licensing costs and buying this software box. This in turn will add to the cost of expenses of a particular organization
When we get the installation of the SAP BO BI Platform done on one of the BO servers, we get a whole of stacks of SAP BO BI suite tools installed. This is a package that has reporting tools inside it. For instance, web intelligence-rich clients, SAP Crystal reports, etc. We can get the development done by using these BO reporting tools. We selected the SAP BO BI Platform in our organization because of its less licensing cost and reporting tools being more user-friendly. This helps our organization in proper decision making, planning, and scheduling of web reports which helps in the growth of the organization

Do you think SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence again?

Yes

SAP BO BI platform is very user-friendly. It's a full package that gives us various reporting tools to develop the reports. We can schedule these reports to get them delivered to emails in the format we want, be it like, PDF, Excel, etc
SAP has released various versions of SAP BO BI. starting from 3.1 and going to 4.0,4.1,4.2 and latest being 4.3. SAP provides support to these new versions. As new versions keep on coming, support for the very old software goes out of scope from SAP. it is when the different organization plans to get their BO content migrated from a lower version to a newer version. The newer version had definitely added functionality and features which ease the work of users.
A best-suited scenario which I experienced in the SAP BO BI platform was the scheduling of the web reports in any format, e.g. PDF, Excel, etc, and getting those delivered to BI Inbox, emails, DLs, etc. at any frequency e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This will help users to get hold of the latest data and get the output handy within their email whenever they need it. This is turn will help in important decision makings, planning, etc of the organizations. The less appropriate scenario that I faced was creating different user and user groups with respect to location, data involvement, etc. Managing the huge list of user and user groups and assigning appropriate roles, e.g. admin role, read-only role, etc can be a tedious task at one go.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
10
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Delivery to Remote Servers
10
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
9
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
REST API
9
Javascript API
9
iFrames
9
Java API
10
Themeable User Interface (UI)
9
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
10