SAP BI/Crystal Server/Crystal Reports – What’s next?

Good News
New release arriving in mid-March 2025. There’ll be another in 2027, then another in 2029 (may slip a bit TBC).
This is all great news. 4.2 was supposed to be the last version, then we were told it would be 4.3. It looks like SAP’s cloud-only strategy hasn’t worked out quite so well as they’d hoped. There’s similar news for their ERP products (not my product area).

Name Change
It’s not SAP BI 4.3, it’s SAP BI 2025 (with all the BusinessObjects variants). I think this takes us into double figures for names over the years. It’s what keeps the marketing department employed.

Product Rationalisation
That’s a great way to say ‘we’re chucking out all the rubbish’.

• Crystal Reports for Enterprise – I’m sure this disappeared during 4.2, but it’s on the list. It was never very good and won’t be missed by anyone. A pointless diversion.
• Lumira Discovery – a sort of nice product doomed due to countless changes in name and poor marketing. Finally killed off for being too like SAP Analytics Cloud.
• Lumira Designer – no, I can never remember the difference between these two either. It’s still supported, just nothing new.
• Analysis for OLAP – I thought this had already gone too! Another mess of product name changes and unclear use cases. It will still be supported, just no enhancements (no change there!).
• Live Office – one of those products I liked to demo but nobody wanted to use. Designed to get away from the constant ‘Can I export that to Excel’ questions. People still just export to Excel.
• SAP BO Mobile – I liked this, especially as Safari on iPad had such poor support for the BI Launchpad in its early days. When the Launchpad updated to Fiori (the blue one), it wasn’t really needed any more.
• UNV Universes – it’s been a long time coming but now dropped. Use UNX. If you want multi-source Universes, do the mashup in WebI (a horrid idea).
• AIX & Solaris – First time I’d heard that Solaris was ever supported! Linux or Windows from now on. If you’re using Crystal Reports, it’s Windows only for the report processing servers.

What’s New
I know this is why you’re reading this, so without further ado:

• Behind the scenes – there’s a bunch of stuff to make migration easier. Mostly around maintaining server configuration during migration. No details as yet.
• SAML/OpenID – yes, boring stuff but it’s been improved.
• Pinning KPI & Charts on the Launchpad – Your launchpad can now be a sort of Dashboard by pinning widgets from WebI.
• Launchpad Performance – It’s faster. No numbers, just be grateful it isn’t even slower.
• Crystal Reports 2025 – I’ll be writing about this separately. Big stuff is improved UNX support. Better parameter prompting and improved hierarchies. That’s more new features than we’ve had in the last 4 versions.
• Web Intelligence – There’s a new offline viewer with full interactivity. This feels like it’s 15 years late. We now have a permanent data connection so why have a Windows-only, offline viewer? Good news is that you won’t need a licence to view the documents.

Upgrading
If you’re currently running SAP BI 4.2, it will be an easy upgrade. Not much more than a service pack. Personally, I prefer to migrate to a new server which is a bit more complicated but does mean you’re up to date on OS etc.
If you’re running an earlier version, using Crystal Reports, you’re going to be moving from running the reports using a 32 bit process to one using 64 bit. If you’re using ODBC, it’s just a case of installing identical 64 bit DSNs. If you’re using OLE DB, get ready to test as they’re name specific and MS SQL uses many different names.

Summary
The great news is that this is happening at all. SAP have been so focused on their cloud stuff that this was all being left behind. Now the BI Portfolio has shrunk, it leaves more time to focus on what we really use rather than the latest distracting toy.