Why Implement a BusinessObjects Enterprise Solution?


Having defined what BusinessObjects Enterprise is, the following sections describe some of the reasons why an organization would want to deploy a BusinessObjects Enterprise infrastructure.

Standardize on one business intelligence vendor. Many organizations, especially larger ones, tended to have many business intelligence tools. This was a direct result of these tools focusing on the different reporting requirements. For example, some vendors focused on production reporting whereas others believed in query and analysis or an OLAP solution. BusinessObjects Enterprise provides the organization with solutions to handle all these situations, thereby consolidating support and development activities.

Leverage existing infrastructure. BusinessObjects Enterprise is built on open standards, supports a variety of operating systems, and is extensible via industry-standard programming languages. Further, it supports authentication against popular LDAP stores, integration into common portals, and integration with common ERP packages, such as SAP and Peoplesoft. This open nature results in Enterprise fitting seamlessly into the organization's existing infrastructure.

Tip

Please see http://support.businessobjects.com/ for a listing of supported platforms. An alternative source of supported platforms is Platforms.txt, which can be found in the Platforms folder on the BusinessObjects Enterprise CD.


Self service. Through the use of the semantic layers, Enterprise reduces the reliance on the Information Systems department by giving users the ability to write and modify their own reports. These documents can then be saved back to Enterprise to share with other users. Furthermore, Encyclopedia allows the report creator to store pertinent information such as keywords and a definition of the business problem this report is solving. This facilitates easier searching and ensures that the user is using the appropriate reports to answer their questions.

Increased user adoption. By providing business intelligence components in familiar environments such as Microsoft Office or delivering the content through a portal familiar to the user, users are far more likely to adopt the technology.

Leverage existing skill sets. At the time of this writing, there are more than 14 million registered copies of Crystal Reports. Furthermore, the organization stated that the Business Objects technology is embedded in more than 650 third-party software products. Business Objects has a wide installed base and if an organization does not already have Business Objects skills, they can be readily attained or existing staff members trained. In addition to this, Business Objects Live Office allows the end user to populate Microsoft Office documents with information via BusinessObjects Enterprise XI. The user never has to leave the familiar Office environment to populate and interact with his data, increasing adoption of the tool.

Leverage your existing Business Objects investment. BusinessObjects Enterprise allows for an easy and efficient way to consolidate all your existing Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports into one manageable infrastructure. The Import Wizard enables users to easily point to multiple Business Objects 6 systems or Crystal Enterprise systems and import the relevant objects.

Integrated into your development environment. If your organization develops its own web applications, creating reports within these applications is often ignored, untimely, and are not easily maintained. Business Objects has integrated its reporting engine and development APIs into the leading Integrated Development Environment (IDE) packages, such as Borland's JBuilder and C# Builder, BEA's Weblogic Studio, IBM's Websphere Studio, and Microsoft's Visual Studio. Without leaving the IDE, the developer can embed reports within the application, while using the scalability and security of the Enterprise system.

One toolmany data sources. Crystal Reports is well known for its capability to connect to a wide variety of data sources. This includes not only standard relational databases such as Oracle and SQL Server, but also ERP applications such as SAP or even data objects, such as JavaBeans or ADO.NET.

This great range of connectivity results in organizations requiring only one tool to access their information, versus possibly multiple software tools that require multiple skill sets.

Simplified content creation. BusinessObjects Enterprise XI incorporates metadata layers that abstract the complexity of the data source. Databases typically have complex joins between tables, technical field naming conventions, and complex security requirements. The combination of these factors makes report design challenging without detailed knowledge of the data source. A metadata layer allows, for example, a database administrator to join, filter, and secure different data sources, providing the content creator a listing of user-friendly field names, formulas, and parameters that she can make use of in her content. The creator does not need to concern herself with the complexities of the data source, rather with meeting the business requirement.

This division of labor speeds report development because the content creators can focus on their task of report development. Furthermore, this reduced dependency on database knowledge enables more business-oriented people to become content creators.

Reuse of components. The capability to change a component and have this change cascade through all content makes reuse a valuable proposition. For example, the organization wants to change how it calculates a formulasay "Days Sales Outstanding." In this example, the designer could simply make one change to the formula in the repository and have this change cascade through all reports that use this formula. If the user just had a bunch of reports on a shared drive somewhere, he would need to sort through these reports and determine which reports had this formula and then make changes to all the affected reports. The Crystal Reports repository that was available in versions 9 and 10 of the product has been migrated to BusinessObjects Enterprise XI. This repository allows sharing of commonly used content such as formulas, text, image files, and custom SQL statements. One of these objects can now be updated and any content using the object will be updated, saving a large amount of maintenance work.

Another example of reuse is the capability to have multiple reports using a single Business View or universe as its data source. If the Business View or universe is changed, for example, its data connection is pointed at another data source; all reports that use this data source are updated.

Caution

One of the main components missing from this reuse and update functionality is the capability to do version control. In other words, it is difficult to go back to the old version after an update has taken place.


For more detailed information on Business Views and the Repository, Change management. Related to the reuse of components is the concept of change management. When your business requirements are going to change, it is critical to know where a report is used or what its data source is. For example, a database administrator wants to move one database over to another; however, he is uncertain what reports are using this database. BusinessObjects Enterprise can provide him a listing of reports that would be affected. Furthermore, should the administrator use the Business Objects Data Integrator product for this migration, he would then have full visibility from the final report to the originating data source.

Information flow. Information flow refers to the flow of information from the bottom of an organization to the top. With the increased focus on corporate accountability, it is vital that senior management know what is actually happening at lower levels. BusinessObjects Enterprise, through its process tracker, allows for effective passing of information from one employee to another based on a defined business process.

Corporate accountability also places a large emphasis on security, ensuring that users should only see what they are allowed to see and preventing outsiders from accessing the data. The metadata layers secure the underlying data, the Enterprise security model defines who can access the objects, and the auditing options record who accessed the data. Outsiders are prevented from accessing the system via flexible firewall options and support for third-party security systems such as Computer Associate's SiteMinder or Kerberos's authentication protocol.

Scalability and reliability. Reliable and timely access to information is not something that should be taken lightly. Performance and downtime are difficult to predict in real world situations. BusinessObjects Enterprise provides an infrastructure that is designed to scale and enables fault tolerance. To achieve this, BusinessObjects Enterprise takes the process required to create and deliver the data and breaks it down into various services (daemons on UNIX). Auditing tools enable you to determine over/under usage and you can then take the appropriate action. For example, when scheduling a job, there is a service (or daemon on UNIX) called the Job Server that performs this task. If the jobs are taking too long to run, another Job Service can be registered with the framework. This new service could run on the same server as the initial service or another server on the network. By adding this service on the second server, a level of fault tolerance is achieved and should the initial server fail, the Job Service on the second server will take over.

For a more detailed discussion on BusinessObjects Enterprise Architecture, p. 596





Crystal Reports XI(c) Official Guide
Crystal Reports XI Official Guide
ISBN: 0672329174
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 365

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