Administration & Security

Do I Feel Lucky? Musings on Promotion Management

Dirty Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood)

Nothing as exhilarating as having all eyes of the project team on you as you use Promotion Management (formerly known as Lifecycle Manager) to move SAP BusinessObjects universes and reports into production at the 11th hour.

Do you feel lucky?

I know what you’re thinking. “Did he create six Web Intelligence reports or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is Promotion Management, the lifecycle management tool for the most powerful business intelligence suite in the world, and would blow your promotion job clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?

Well, do ya, punk?

Today when I create and run a Promotion Management job, I get nervous, say a prayer, and hope I get lucky. I’m currently helping a customer apply a patch from BI 4.0 Support Pack 5 Patch 6 to Support Pack 6. Unfortunately, Promotion Management does not correctly calculate linked universe dependencies and the core universe does not get promoted to its proper destination (refer to SAP KB 1767657 for details). The issue was corrected in Support Pack 4 Patch 4; however, that patch- and many others- was forward fit to SP6 (refer to SAP BusinessObjects maintenance schedule and forward fit plan), not to SP5.

Let’s hope that SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.1– which was released to customers (RTC) and into ramp-up this week- brings some improvements to the promotion management process when it goes into general availability (GA), expected in late Q3 2013.

Dallas Marks

Dallas Marks

I am an analytics and cloud architect, author, and trainer. An AWS certified blogger, SAP Mentor Alumni and co-author of the SAP Press book SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence: The Comprehensive Guide, I prefer piano keyboards over computer keyboards when not blogging or tweeting.

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7 thoughts on “Do I Feel Lucky? Musings on Promotion Management”

  1. Always Baffled me that BO/BI4 had got so far as an enterprise solution without both a decent version management and code promotion tool.

  2. In general BO 4.0 has humiliated us in many occasions with various issues. Major one – someone needs to look at all the error messages and convert them into English. The users already feel that they are made “testers” of this product!

  3. Wow. I thought I was the only one having sporadic issues with Promotion Management. We are currently running BOB4, SP4, Patch 10 and it seems to be behaving itself. We will be moving up to SP6 in the next few weeks. I will be sure to test the Promotion Management before applying SP6 to production installations.

    Dalls, It is always a pleasure to read your musings.

    1. Mickey,

      Thanks for writing. On June 26, 2013, ASUG is sponsoring a webinar entitled “What is New in BI4.1 Promotion Management” and I hope the first bullet is “It works!”.

      Good luck with SP6. We just moved a customer from BI 4.0 SP5 Patch 5.6 to SP6 to pick up all of the missing SP4 patches, but now we’re struggling with Web Intelligence and linked universes, which make up about 90% of the system. I’ll post more once I know what’s going on.

      Dallas

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