Many organizations are planning to move BW to to HANA and is looking for information on how to do this. In this blog we take a look at some of the major tasks you should consider when moving BW to HANA. We also include references to notes and transactions so that you can get started on writing your project plan.

By Dr. Berg

Introduction

These are some of the major tasks for a BW to HANA migration. Once you have added all sub-tasks, a typical workplan has 400-600 detailed items, including status reports, team meetings, issues, hardware validation, portal integration and tests of front-end tools. 

However, these first 76 steps should give you enough to get you started on writing your project plan.

Pre-Activity Steps for each environment (Dev, QA & Prod)

1. Clean the Persistent Staging Area (PSA) for data already loaded to DSOs

2. Delete the Aggregates aggregates (summary tables). They will not be needed again.

3. Compress the E and F tables in all InfoCubes. This will make InfoCubes much smaller.

4. Remove data from the statistical cubes (they start with the technical name of 0CTC_xxx). These contain performance information for the BW system running on the relational database. You can do this using the transaction RSDDSTAT or the program RSDDSTAT_DATA_DELETE to help you.

5. Look at log files, bookmarks and unused BEx queries and templates (transaction RSZDELETE). 6. Remove as much as possible of the DTP temporary storage, DTP error logs, and temporary database objects. Help and programs to do this are found in SAP Notes 1139396 and 1106393.

7. For write-optimized DSOs that push data to reportable DSOs (LSA approach), remove data in the write-optimized DSOs. It is already available in higher level objects.

8. Migrate old data to Near-Line Storage (NLS) on a small server. This will still provide access to the data for the few users who infrequently need to see this old data. You will also be able to query it when BW is on HANA, but it does not need to be in-memory.

10. Remove data in unused DSOs, InfoCubes and files used for staging in the BW system. This includes possible reorganization of masterdata text and attributes using process type in RSPC 11. You may also want to clean up background information stored in the table RSBATCHDATA. This table can get very big if not managed.

12. You should also consider archiving any IDocs and clean the tRFC queues. All of this will reduce size of the HANA system and help you fit the system tables on the master node.

13. Size reduction of Basis Tables. In SAP Note 706478, SAP provides some ideas on how to keep the basis tables from growing too fast too fast in the future.

14. As of Service Pack 23 on BW 7.0, we can also delete unwanted master data directly (see SAP Note: 1370848).

15. Use the program RSDDCVER_DIM_UNUSED to delete any unused dimension entries in your InfoCubes to reduce the overall system size (not a factor if you plan on using the optimized HANA infocubes)

Pre-Validation steps

16. Run BW to HANA Migration Readiness Check (v2.0) in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve all high priority issues including connectivity checks, service packs, security, basis, db notes and general check in the tool for SB, Dev, QA and Prod.

17. Run ZBW_ABAP_ANALYZER for checks of ETL ABAP code and fix outstanding issues in SB, Dev, QA and Prod. Add HANA hints where required. This is found in  SAP Note 1847431

18. Run full delta load and gather benchmark performance statistics for load and activations

20. Run key queries, reports and dashboards for collection of benchmark statistics and performance, including any BEx broadcaster jobs, pre-calculations and workbooks.

- Other: 

a) Conduct HANA development workshops

b) Complete HANA Admin workshop and training

c) Create an SLA and Support plan for SAP HANA internally

d) Confirm Backup, Disaster recovery and HA plan

Environment staging and Migration (post hardware install, validation and handover)

21. Run backup of database in SAP BW Sandbox

22. Suspend jobs and SB development activities

23. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (export and import)

24. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

25. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

26. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

27. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

28. Run full Delta Loads from process chains (create a few records in the source environment if required) and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

29. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

30 Go / No-Go decision

31. Run backup of database in SAP BW Development environment

32. Suspend jobs and development activities in the development environment

33. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (technical migration export and import)

34. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

35. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

36. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

37. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

38. Run full Delta Loads from process chains (create a few records in the source environment if required) and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

39. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

40 Go / No-Go decision

41. Refresh QA box from Prod if feasible

42. Run backup of database in SAP BW QA environment

43. Suspend jobs and transports in the QA environment

44. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (technical migration export and import)

45. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

46. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

47. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

48. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

49. Run full Delta Loads from process chains (create a few records in the source environment if required) and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

50. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

Other:

a) Test backup/restore capabilities

b) Test and collect benchmarks for High Availability and/or Disaster Recovery

51 Go / No-Go decision

----------

52. Develop detailed Production cutover plan with times steps for export and import of files.

53. Develop production validation test plan and assign resources

54. Run backup of database in SAP BW QA environment

55. Suspend jobs and transports in the QA environment

56. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (technical migration export and import)

57. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

58. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

59. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

60. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

61. Run full Delta Loads from process chains  and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

62. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

63. User migration and log-on validation

64. Setup Alerts in SAP HANA Studio

65. Assign System roles and privileges in all environments

66. Setup basepaths for all backups

67. Validate CPU usage, memory footprint and system load during test run for reports and data loads.

68. Create a standard operating procedure for SAP HANA support staff

69. Setup update site and process for HANA studio (SUM), license keys and support

70. Go/No-Go Decision (restore)

71. Optional: Optimize key DSOs to new HANA optimized DSOs

72. Optional: Optimize key InfoCubes to new HANA optimized InfoCubes (flattened dimensions)

73. Optional: remove partitions from LSA and simplify data architecture by reducing layers

74. Optional: Create a New capabilities assessment to take advantage of near-time data warehousing using SLA

75. Optional: setup external data movement into new Data Services ETL processing chains

76. Optional: Start removing InfoCubes and build HANA views on DSOs where appropriate, thereby reducing data replication, size and data latency (non-IP, BPC and non-cumulative KFs).

Summary

While not a complete workplan, these tasks can function as the skeleton and starting point for your more detailed workplan with timelines and assigned resources specific to your organization and scope.

Hope it helps..

Dr. Berg 

In this blog we look at a demo of SAP BusinessObjects on HANA with 426 million rows and a BI Workspace with 3 Dashbaords, WebI, Analysis and Crystal Reports. By Dr. Berg

Introduction

This spring I taught a business intelligence class and SAP HANA at my university where I am a professor. I had 18 computer science and IT majors in the class and decided to pilot the new HANA curriculum at the SAP University Alliance. This demo is based on some of their work.

The Tables and Data Load

First, we created four tables for customer, stores, products and sales transactions. Then we kept loading 1.05 million rows to the sales fact table using the BusinessObjects Data Services ETL tool. We re-ran the job with different keys until we had filled the fact table with more than 426,000,000 rows (click on image if you want to see the details)

Figure 1: the Sales Fact Table

The Views

Then we created attribute views for customer, store and products as well as an analytical view joining the attribute views to the transactional table. This view is the logical presentation of a star-schema that is used in our dashboards.

 Figure 2: The HANA Analytical View for reporting

The BusinessObjects Demo

We then used 2 sales dashboards on top of the HANA view, and for good measure we added one more dashboard from General ledger that did not use the view, as well as more tools based on Microsoft Analysis Services data sources. This included BusinessObjects WebI report, a Crystal Report and BusinessObjects Analysis. All of which were executed in parallel in a BI Workspace creating a true test of HANA and the BOBJ tools.

The Demo  

This demo shows the HANA tables and the resulting BusinessObjects workspace with HANA and non-HANA sourced data. Pay particularly attention to the fact that the HANA system is in Germany, the BI system is in the USA and the user (me) is in a different location. And, we still see less than 12 seconds load time on all components (who said SAP is slow? J). Take a look of what now is possible in this short demo.

Next Time and BI 2013 Amsterdam

Next time we will look at other less known partitioning options for HANA Administrators and developers. Meanwhile, join me in Amsterdam next month for the BI 2013 conference where we take an in-depth look at HANA as well as some of the Dashbaord design options....

Thanks,

Dr. Berg

In This video blog we look at five steps that helps you automate many of the tasks of moving SAP BW to HANA, including sizing, pre-checks, cleanup, ETL automated checks and HANA migration options. By Dr. Berg

INTRODUCTION

Many organizations that are currently using SAP BW and BI on relational databases are struggeling with the first steps in planning and executing their BW to HANA migration efforts.

In this video blog we look at what is new in the 2nd edition of the SAP HANA book from SAP Press, and also dives into the new automated programs that can assist you in your migration project with practical advice and examples.

5 key steps on How to Execute your BW to SAP HANA Move

(select high resolution if you are using a big-screen and turn on sound). 

Meanwhile, I am preparing a demo with 420+ million rows with 3 dashboards, WebI, Analysis, Crystal Report and more that I will be sharing on this blog later this week after Sapphire..  Stay tuned :-)

Dr. Berg

Many experienced developers are not aware that moving BW to HANA can in some cases result in slower transformations during data loads. Thankfully, SAP is providing a tool to identify areas in your ABAP code that may benefit from an optimization. In this blog we take a quick look at this valuable tool.

By Dr. Berg

Background

During development of SAP BW Extract Transforms and data Load (ETL) there are many options to create transformations in DTPs in BW 7.x and in older Update and Transfer rules in BW 3.x. Unfortunately, depending on your developers, some of the custom transforms may have sub-optimal ABAP coding can have impacts on how SAP BW ETL performs after the migration to HANA.

Thankfully, SAP’s talented developer Marc Bernard provides an automated tool to help you identify potential coding issues. This program is called the “SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer”, or technically ZBW_ABAP_ANALYZER.

Figure 1: Input Screen for SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer

Overall, the tool looks for and suggests the following fixes:

• a. Select for all entries (SFAE) statements without HANA DB hints --> add hints
• b. Select * --> specify fields to select
• c. Database access in the field routines --> move to start routine
• d. Loops which do not assign field symbols --> use field symbols
• e. Selects from master data tables --> Use the read master data rule
• f. Selects from DSOs --> Use the read DSO rule
• g. Direct updates to BW object tables --> Do not update tables directly
• h. and many more areas...

You can run this program either as on-line, or as a background job. If you run the program on-line (only recommended for a small selection), you can click a link in the output to edit the transformation, transfer rule or update rule.  

Figure 2: On-Line Output for SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer

If you run in the background, you can save a log to SLG1 and also create a spool list for further analysis.

Figure 3: SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer - On-Line Spool list

For organizations that have slow data loads where most of the time is used on transforms and loads, this is a key program that should be run as part of the BW HANA migration planning. The tool should be available for general access in April this year.

Some Observations

The last six weeks in this HANA blog series we have looked at many of the HANA migration tools that Marc and SAP has provided, and I continue to be amazed at both the quality and the speed at which SAP is rolling out tools to make any HANA migration as easy as possible.

In the next blog we will look an in-depth look at some of the ways you can balance the load on the nodes in a HANA system when working with a scale out environment.

Thanks,

Dr. Berg

SAP has released an ABAP based tool that generates a report significantly better for sizing than using just the SAP QuickSizer. This program takes into consideration existing database compression, different table types, and also includes the effects of non-active data in the SAP HANA system. In this blog we take a quick look at this valuable tool.

- By Dr. Berg

Sizing Tool Background and Settings

This program is attached to SAP Note 1736976 and can be downloaded from SAP Marketplace and run on a production system to get very accurate sizing information.

This includes sizing for RAM and dynamic runtime memory, log space and disk space. It even provides details on items such as data sizes with corresponding dynamic runtime memory for row store and column stores, as well as the calculated size and the estimated size in HANA memory for each table in your BW system. Technically, the program uses sampling of the database for sizing, so you should refresh the database statistics before running the program.

 Figure 1: HANA Sizing Program for SAP NetWeaver BW

The higher precision you run the estimate at (selected by radio buttons in Figure 1), the longer the program is going to run. With 14 parallel processors and 8Tb data warehouse, it is not unusual to see 45-75 minutes run time. To increase speed, you can also suppress analysis tables with less than 1 MB size.

In addition, since timeouts are common when running this sizing program, you should temporarily change the parameter in rdisp/max_wprun_time to 0. You can do this in BW Transaction RZ11. Finally, you estimate the growth for the system over a time period. This can be done as a percentage, or as absolute growth in GB.

After all this is done, you have downloaded and installed the program, and selected the parameters above, you can go to Transaction SE38 and run SDF/HANA_BW_SIZING as a background job.

Figure 2: SAP HANA Sizing Results

The output is stored in the file you specified and the file can now be emailed to to hardware vendors for sizing input and hardware selection.

Need more Information?

If you have any questions, just stop by my sessions at SAP BI 2013 Conference in Las Vaegs next week (March 19-22); Amsterdam (June 11-13) or in Singapore in September where I will cover more on these timely topics and also do a HANA book signining event with SAP Press...

Look forward to see you there..

Dr. Berg

There are many tasks and technical requirements to migrate a BW system to HANA. This includes BW technical settings and software levels required to start the process. Thankfully, SAP has provided a checklist tool for SAP NetWeaver BW powered by HANA.   In this Blog we take a quick look at the key features. By Dr. Berg

Automated HANA Readiness Tool

In version 2.x of this tool available since December 2012, hundreds of checks are done automatically in the BW system. This includes platform checks on database and application and system information.

There are even basis checks for support packs, ABAP/JAVA stacks, Unicode, BW releases, and add-ons to your system. The program is found in SAP Note 1729988, and the tool provided automatic check programs for both the 3.5 version and the 7.x version of BW

FIGURE 1: INPUT FOR SELECTING READINESS CHECKS FOR BW TO HANA MIGRATION

First you enter the checks you want to perform to see if your system is ready for a HANA Migration. This should include most of the options seen in the figure above, such as basis and database, but you also can choose to ignore customer objects or checks you are planning to run at a later time.

The idea of the checklist tool from SAP is that you run it several times throughout the project. Once before you start, then periodically as you resolve issues and upgrade requirements, and then finally when the system has been migrated to HANA. This last step is important, since the checklist tool also has specific checks for the HANA system that can help you identify any issues before turning over the system to end users. If the tool shows a ‘red’ flag, you should resolve this before starting your HANA migration, or if a new red flag shows up, fix it before completing the migration.

FIGURE 2: BW READNIESS RESULTS FOR HANA MIGRATION

The output results in a list of actions that should be undertaken before the migration starts. In our example, we can see that for our system database patch 110 should be applied as part of our preparation steps.

Getting Started

If you want to try this program in your system, simply install the latest version from SAP Marketplace in note 1729988 and then execute the program using ZBW_HANA_CHECKLIST for those on a BW 7.x system, or ZBW_HANA_CHECKLIST_3X for those on older BW 3.x systems.  The tool even allows you to download any recommended SAP notes to fix issues found in the check through the automated transaction call of SNOTE. This program should be executed by anyone who is in the planning stages of a BW to HANA migration.

More Information at SAP BI 2013 in Las Vegas

Next month at BI 2013 in Las Vegas, I will be showing more tools and give a detailed presentation on how to create “Strategies for budgeting, planning, and sizing your SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA project”. The session will be at the MGM on Tuesday, March 19, from 12:00 to 1:15 pm.  

During the conference I will also be signing copies of the SAP HANA Book I wrote for SAP press with Penny Silvia and you can stop by to see me at the ‘meet-the-expert’ session and get your HANA questions answered…

Hope to see you there...

Dr. Berg

Many do not know that there is a SAP NetWeaver DBA Cockpit for HANA that is integrated and which provides performance and system information in the BW interface. In this blog we take a quick look at some of the basic capabilities. By Dr. Berg

Introduction

Inside SAP’s data warehouse solution Business Warehouse (BW), you find the Database Administration Cockpit.  This is used to manage and monitoring the underlying relational or HANA based database and is available for organizations with NW 7.3 SP5 and higher.

The cockpit is available under the transaction code DBACOCKPIT, but requires that the security authorizations S_TCODE and S_RZL_ADM are assigned to your role. In the DBA interface you can pass basic transaction calls to the HANA system and get an overview of how it is performing without going to the HANA Studio interface. Some of the transactions supported include:

Figure 1: Transactions supported in BW DBA Cockpit for HANA

 Figure 2: HANA features in the DBA Cockpit in SAP BW

In the DB Performance monitor (DB13) and SAP DB Assistant (DB50) you will find information such as the current status of the system. This shows the status of available disk space and physical memory. The bar is colored black if the usage is upto 97% of available disk and red if it is over 98%.  If the operational state is flagged as 'green' it means that all services are running, while 'yellow' means that one or more services has not started or is not currently running.

Other information included in these transactions include the start time of the first and last started service. If you have a distributed system, you will see the start time of the first and last server here. You will also find when the HANA database software was compiled under the ‘build time’ tag.

Furthermore, you can see any alterts that has been triggered in HANA and notifications of a  critical events if a disk is full.  If you click the 'full disk event' message, and select the event, you can also handle selected events. In addition, you can display the CPU consumption, memory allocations and number of CPUs available, as well as data volume, log and trace files sizes, compread to the size of the disk(s).

Finally, you can monitor the host physical memory, CPU and virtual memory and see the disks containing data, log and trace files on a specific host. All of these featrues makes the DBA Cockpit in SAP BW a very valuable tool for the BW administrators who are using HANA as their BW database.                               

 You can also use the performance warehouse features in the DBA cockpit to see how your system is performing overall. To access it, select performance -> performance warehouse in the DBA cockpit. However, to use this you must have the Solution Manager Diagnostics (SMD) enabled. If you don’t have it enabled, you can use the SMD Setup Wizard to install it.

So for those planning to use SAP BW on a HANA system, these DBA cockpit fetures should make your life quite a bit easier. It is actually great to see how SAP is bringing more and more of the platfoms together as integrated solutions. I work on this every day, and I am frankly amazed at the speed SAP is now operating....

Dr. Berg

On Jan 10th, SAP Announced that SAP ERP can run on the in-Memory Platform called HANA. What does that mean to BW? Is data warehousing dead? Can we simply Report on ERP instead and skip data movement, DSOs, infoCubes, modeling and the extra hardware?  In this blog we look at where we are now and what it may mean for the future. By Dr. Berg

ERP on SAP HANA

As of January 10, 2013, SAP said it supported the deployment of their ERP Business Suite on HANA. The solution requires enhancement pack 6 for SAP ERP version 6.0 and ABAP AS version 7.4 which was made available at the same time.

This raise many questions about the future of traditional On-Line Transaction processing (OLTP) and separate On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) such as data warehouses. Is there really a need to separate the reporting from the transaction processing?

The answer depends on the time horizon you are planning on. In the short run, there are simply too many valuable models in SAP Business Warehouse (BW), Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) , Integrated Planning (IP) and all the other DW based tools to throw them all away. However, these tools also has several Achilles heels; they are not true real time and require separate infrastructure and data movements.

But, SAP Makes a Bold Statement...

Two days ago, SAP's Vishal Sikka wrote in his blog: “with the collapse of OLTP and OLAP in one platform there is a massive simplification on the way” . There is naturally a lot riding on this vision and a substantial amount of development must take place to organize the data in the OLTP system in a way that is designed for reporting.  

I can see that some operational version of this can be done in the future through separate HANA reporting tables in the ERP system (much like what we used to have with EIS, SIS, LIS in the early days of ERP), or by creating views on the data using HANA studio, XS or other tools.

Dr. Berg Speculates

However, for the foreseeable future, I believe SAP BW provides an integrated platform for model driven analysis on data that needs to be preserved at the time of transaction, integrated with external data, and which contains the corporate ‘memory’ of what happened in the past.  So, the vision of an integrated BI and ERP system on the same platform is just that; a vision.  Technically, it is not possible to install BW and ERP on the same HANA system today.

On the other hand, for real-time operational reporting the ability to move your SAP ERP system to a HANA platform allows you to execute transactions faster, reduces the database size, simplifies the administration (really!) and provides new analytical capabilities inside the ERP system that simply was not possible before.

Some Early Examples of ERP on HANA Analytics

An example of these is the new abilities is found in the SAP Business One Application, version for the HANA Platform. In this ERP solution,  SAP included embedded contextual dashboards in the transactional screens.

This include graphs for items such as most purchased products by customers, credit dashboards,  real-time inventory trends, vendor analysis, cash flow forecasting,  and much more.  SAP has also announced that they plan to develop even more of these types of applications in future release (so this may be the future of operational real-time analytics).

Conclusions

There is a lot of people wanting to skip the model driven approach and go straigh to ERP for analytics and BI. For those it is important to be reminded that there is a reason why the models were build in the first place. It was to simplify reporting and provide a business view to cleansed, integrated and often transformed transactional data to provide meaning.  This is not found in a transactional table.  So we may get there as Vishal stated in his blog, but there still along way to go.. 

SAP BW is still an integral part of the data warehouse landscape for many years to come, and with HANA there is even more benefits to keep it around...

But, O’boy is it not fun speculate though?   :-)

Dr. Berg

In this blog we look at the details of the new iPad and HTML-5 support in SAP Dashboards in service pack-5. We look at limitations, our experiences in ComeritLabs and what is planned for SP06, SDK and BI 4.1.

By Dr. Berg

SP-5 for iPad Mobility in Dashboards

As you may know SAP's dashbaord tool has received some updates in ServicePack-5 that was released a few weeks ago. Most importantly was the support for mobile dashboard elements for deployment using HTML-5 on non-flash compatible devices such as Apple's iPad.

There are currently a limited number of mobile dashboard elements supported, but they are the most commonly utilized elements. This means that many of your current dashboards can be converted to mobile with minimal effort. SP-5 also use a new mobile only preview mode. This shows dashboards as they will appear on the iPad before your deploy them. We found very helpful during our devlopment and design efforts.  In addition to these items, all standard data connections work on mobile dashboards including BEx and Universe connections.

Figure 1: Supported Objects in SP-5 for Mobile

This week we took a client's flash based dashboard and re-hosted it using the new mobile solution in less than 8 hours, so it can be done fast...

So What is Missing Today?

Some important things to note about the current SP05 are the exclusion of some key elements such as the lack of a prompt selector.  There are also no calendar controls and HTML text for labels isn’t supported. Connections in the Data manager are only currently available in the pre-query panel and only the “Nova” theme is supported on mobile devices. We also have no support for the prompt selector for hierarchies in SP05, nor is the 'reset' and the 'save senario' available.

Another major component that is not currently available in SP05 are spreadsheets tables, making tables harder to make. However, SAP supports the use of the URL button in mobile dashboards, so we are making progress. The trick is to use the features supported today and find workaround of those missing as of now.

When converting we found that the new “Mobile Compatibility” tab displays suggestions and warning for optimizing dashboard components for mobile deployment.  

Figure 2: Warning messages when converting dashboards to Mobile

Warnings as in this picture, simply means that there are better ways of doing this. The dashboard still works. Error messages means that it will not work. We found this featrue to be very valuable.

We also liked the fact that mobile specific text fonts are marked with “iOS 5+”  to show which fonts will work best on our dashboard.

Figure 3: Supported Fonts are Identified easily:

Our Mobile Dashboard and iPad Experience

We at ComeritLabs utilized these new mobile objects this week to create a set of mobile dashboards.  We found that it is possible to convert existing dashboards relatively easily to the mobile platform.  However, mobile deployment is not yet supported until SAP’s BI Mobile app is version 4.4 is released this month (4.3.11 is the current release).

While we found that our iPad dashboard's to execute fine, we noted that Internet Explorer have a few limitations due to the current HTML-5 support. This is important since future dashboards may be deployed simultaneously to both mobile and BI 4.x Launchpad environments. However, we expect all major browsers will have 100% support for all HTML-5 items in a very short time, and as of now that has not been any show-stopper for any dashbaords in our test. They simply works great on an iPad.

The Future in SP-6, DSK and BI 4.1

While there is no new mobile features planned for dashboards in SP-6, there is a lot of activity with incorporating an SDK in the mobile solution for dashboards.

Currently, SAP is working with Antivia, APOS, Centigon Solutions, and Graphomate in Germany on POCs for mobile enhancements using a SDK that may be incuded in the BusinessObjects 4.1 release (scheduled for the second quarter 2013). If this gets included, there will be significant step to sharing objects and it will open up a whole new set of mobile capabilities that can be added in a short timeframe.

I will keep updating this blog with more demos and screenshots as soon as I obtain a client's permission and SAP's new BI Mobile app is version 4.4 in a few days.

But the short story is that SAP is making mobile headways in a very short timeframe.

Stay tuned...
Dr.  Berg

An interview of the co-author of the new #1 best-selling HANA book from SAP Press on how HANA works, what it can do and how to implement with practical advice  (9 minutes).

Intro to HANA With Dr. Berg