Item: SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
Rating: 7
Author: Michael Spino

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business Objects

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Business Objects is being used as a reporting tool for both IT and business teams. It's relied upon to query a number of data sources including Oracle databases, datamarts, and EDW data stores. Reports are primarily created and maintained by a combination of IT and business teams. Business objects provides the ability for quick adhoc reporting and scheduling of routine reports.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Quick ad hoc reporting of standardized information from the same datasource
Easy drag and drop interface for new users to get acclimated to existing datasources without having to know the intricate join logic
Web based interface allows users to easily share and distribute reports they create
Scheduling allows users to setup a report to run for any time and frequency they prefer with little maintenance.

Cons

Hard to keep track of changes to reports and report recovery
Frequent version upgrades require businesses to update their infrastructure and reports
Diminishing support from SAP for the Business Objects suite

Alternatives Considered

SAP Business Objects is primarily used since it can plug into a large variety of existing data sources and only required setup of it's own admin server. A number of other tools have been utilized for functionality but SAP Business Objects proved the best for reporting.

Likelihood to Renew

Likelihood to Recommend

SAP Business Objects is well suited for both scheduling reports and ad hoc reporting. Users can typically learn the basic reporting functionality without a lot of training. The tool is not strong in pulling data from multiple data sources for the same report and the more advanced reporting is hard to learn.

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A Quick Summary of Business Objects

Software Version

Modules Used