The wait is finally over. On Friday, June 15, 2012, SAP released SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 Future Pack 3. No, that isn’t a typo. Future Pack 3 (and its already generally available successor, Support Pack 4) is finally here. The latest iteration of SAP’s business intelligence platform isn’t intended to merely warm over your current business intelligence infrastructure but instead extend the reach of your corporate BI platform to places in the organization it could never go before.
The worst thing you could possibly do in an upgrade kickoff meeting is send your business users the message that “the upgrade will be long and painful but the charts will be prettier”. In my first article written for the EV Technologies blog, I examine three ways that you can reinvent the typical business intelligence upgrade and use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 Feature Pack 3 and Support Pack 4 to take your business into the future.
Read Future Pack 3 and Reinventing the Business Intelligence Upgrade on the EV Technologies blog.
Read Feature Pack 3, We Hardly Knew Ye
I don’t know about “Future” Pack. The March 31st, 2012 says SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Feature Pack 3. The currenct SAP download link says: SBOP BI Platform Servers 4.0 SP04 (including FP03). We were part of the “ramp up” where we had to deal with FP3 and essentially Beta Test the silly thing. The current SP4 seems to be a actual patch. When I installed it on a non BOE platform, it said it needed a BOE installation. The SP4 patch did install with no problems on top of my FP3 machines. Some FP3 issues were fixed, some were not. I am still not a fan of BOE4. There are just too many loose ends.