Data Access Interfaces for SAP BW

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In release 1.2 of BW, SAP provides two native tools to distribute and access data from SAP BW. These tools, Business Explorer Browser and Business Explorer Analyzer, work fine when end-users' analytical needs can be satisfied using the Microsoft Excel environment. The SAP BW add-in for Microsoft Excel adds data slicing-and-dicing capability that exploits such SAP R/3 features as multi-language support, multi-currency conversions, and complex result-set data structures that are not available in pure Microsoft Excel. However, when you need to design a sophisticated analytical application, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a Microsoft Excel workbook-centric solution to drive analytical processes through event-driven control objects, such as menus, buttons, list boxes, and Windows events that third-party OLAP tools provide.

The present release of SAP BW 1.2B does not provide tools to implement pure Web-based applications. However, a few third-party tools can use ODBO to build and deploy pure Web-centric analytical applications against SAP BW and other data sources.

Selecting a third-party data access and reporting tool for SAP BW is a complex process. Not all users have the same data access and reporting needs. For example, financial analysts may feel very comfortable working with BEX Analyzer because it is similar to a spreadsheet. On the other hand, the manufacturing operations staff may not feel comfortable working with Excel because they are used to a screen-centric solution to specify query-selection parameters using several drop-down list boxes and a printed report with specific formats and page breakdown. Building such solutions in a Microsoft Excel environment takes a lot of time. Several third-party data access and reporting tool vendors provide good alternatives to BEX Analyzer. The rule of thumb is to first use BEX Analyzer as much as possible; if your company has already selected standard corporate-wide data access and reporting tools, make sure that the tools provider has been certified for ODBO interface for SAP BW.

In version 2.0A of SAP BW, you can publish BEX queries, using SAP BW Web Publisher Wizard, on a Web server in HTML format. The published queries are dynamic. You can drill down or refresh data from the Web browser. In SAP BW 2.0A and 2.0B, you still have to have BEX Analyzer to compose basic queries and then publish on the Web. SAP is planning to deliver a pure Web-reporting development environment for SAP BW starting with the release of BW 2.0B after its general availability. This Web development environment for SAP BW will exploit the SAP Internet Transaction Server (ITS) as the SAP BW Web server. For more information on SAP BW Web reporting, see Appendix D, "Key Enhancements in SAP BW 2.0."

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