SAP Press recently released Discover SAP BusinessObjects by Chris Dinkel, JC Raveneau, and Thierry Audas. This book is a great addition to your bookshelf, especially if your role is to recommend SAP BusinessObjects solutions to customers or coworkers. As a technology consultant that lives and breathes this stuff, most of the material was not new. However, I found the coverage of less-familiar topics like EPM and GRC very helpful. The book provides a high-level overview of the entire SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, starting with the standard Business Intelligence (BI) suite (SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, Web Intelligence, etc.) and moving through On-Demand solutions, Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC).
The book describes the current SAP BusinessObjects product landscape while looking ahead to the future roadmap. Despite the book’s recent publication, it still reveals SAP’s last-minute internal wrangling over product names. For example, Web Intelligence 4.0 is referred to as Interactive Analysis (which I predict will be its name in BI 5.0) and “Advanced Analysis” (Pioneer) has been released as simply “Analysis”. I enjoyed chapter two the most- “Business Objects: A Historical Perspective”, which provides the colorful history of Business Objects from its founding in 1990 by Bernard Liautaud and Denis Payre to its acquisition by SAP to the present.
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Hi Dallas,
Thanks for the review! You’re right, the idea of the book was to cover the entire portfolio at a higher level. The need that was initially expressed by SAP customers interested by this portfolio new to them but I also met quite a few ‘classic’ BusinessObjects professionals & customers who were eager to discover the full extent of the portfolio and the new BI 4.0
Yes product names were changed as we were writing the book. However we do have an Interactive Analysis product in the SME portfolio still. This being said I may have missed a replacement somewhere but could not find it. If you let me know the page I could check it.
Regards,
JC