SAPinsider Q&A on What’s Next with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and SAP BusinessObjects Lumira 2.0

Jeroen and I did another Q&A chat for SAPinsider. This time the topic was the big upcoming  Lumira 2.0 release. As always, we discussed a lot of interesting topics, ranging from the new features and interoperability scenarios, to new licensing setup and migration scenarios.

You can find the chat replay and the transcript here.

How to convert SAP Lumira documents using Local HANA Connection to Managed HANA Connection

This is a guest post by SAP BI specialist Martijn van Foeken, Interdobs B.V. 

Since Lumira 1.29 it is possible to connect to the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform and this enables you to consume Managed Connections that are controlled inside the Central Management Console (CMC). Matthew Shaw wrote a great blog that describes that managed connection are the way forward, how to consume these managed connections and what the benefits are.

Let’s assume we want to create a seamless user experience for BI launchpad users and want to leverage managed connections to SAP HANA with authentication set to SSO for Lumira documents. But what if we are using local connections for our Lumira documents instead of a managed connection. If we publish these Lumira documents to the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, users will be prompted to provide a HANA username and password when viewing the Lumira document via the BI launchpad.

This means we need to change the connection from local to managed and unfortunately this is not possible from within SAP Lumira.

So are we forced to rebuild Lumira documents based on a local SAP HANA connection? Let me show you how you can avoid this ;-).

First go to SAP Note 2337153 and download the HanaLocalToMC.zip file. Unzip the file and double-click it to launch the application.

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OMG they killed SCN

The new SAP Community (formerly SCN – SAP Community Network) must be one of the biggest cluster fucks of 2016. It seems to meet all the conditions of the definition:

clusterfuck ‎(plural clusterfucks)

1. (slang, vulgar) A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.

After a few weeks and several hopeful attempts I’ve totally given up on this platform. And I’m apparently not the only one. The problem with the previous SCN was that it was hard to find stuff. But, when you finally found the right spaces it kinda worked as you could easily browse the discussion topics you were interested in and see whether questions are already answered.

My Lumira question from 23 November has now 6 (!!!) views and 0 replies. And there are lots of other Lumira topics with even less views. If I look at the Design Studio area I see the same thing. Most of the topics have max 10 views. On the old SCN this was a very popular space and people were almost fighting to provide help. Oh, and the upvoting feature isn’t used at all.

The main problem is that the new SAP Community lacks any clear structure (yes, there are ‘tags’) and the bizarre thing seems to be that this is by design! I get the feeling that it doesn’t want to be like a classic forum for some unclear reason.

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De Nederlandse BI Podcast – Episode 24

Tonight we recorded edition 24 of De Nederlandse BI Podcast! We talked about TechEd Las Vegas 2016, Lumira 2.0, HANA Express and BW/4HANA.

As always, you can find the show in iTunes, on our website or just use the Podcast player below to listen instantly. Warning: Dutch content only!

SAP Lumira 2.0 – Some new insights

SAP Lumira 2.0 was announced earlier this year as the successor to SAP Lumira 1.x and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6. But, apart from a few screenshots and roadmap slides I hadn’t seen much of this new version yet. Luckily there was a SAP Partner update webinar last Friday that gave some more insights and even showed a short demo of the new Lumira 2.0. At TechEd Las Vegas this week probably the same information will be shared.

First, the release of Lumira 2.0 is postponed and is now expected to be somewhere late Q2/early Q3 2017. As Lumira 1.x and Design Studio 1.6 won’t get any new features, I’d guess we can only expect some minor patch releases the coming year until 2.0 is GA. Reason for the delay is that the current product quality is not up to par and SAP doesn’t want to limit the scope for the 2.0 release. This means that the agile development/release approach we have seen for the past years on Lumira is now put on hold.

Next we already knew that Lumira 2.0 is a convergence of Lumira and Design Studio. There will be one product (Lumira), with two user interfaces (Designer and Discovery) using common technology. I still haven’t seen any real interoperability between the tools/interfaces, so I’m still curious what the exact advantage for the user would be here. From an BI admin perspective we’ll get a single BI Platform add-on, instead of the separate ones we now have for Lumira and Design Studio.

Below are some slides regarding Lumira Discovery, mostly showing user interface/experience changes/improvements.

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