Last week, InfoSol CEO Paul Grill wrote an article entitled When to Jump Into BI 2025 and Avoid the Jellyfish. Paul writes:
My experience reminded me of some recent conversations I had with BusinessObjects customers about upgrading to the new BI 2025 release. They are hesitant to take the plunge and— when they do— they will be watching out for problems that might sting them, just like jellyfish!
Paul’s comments reminded me of my own experience helping a customer migrate from BI 4.2 to BI 4.3 in 2022. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.3 SP0 was released in June 2020 and BI 4.3 SP1 arrived six months later in December 2020. A year would pass before BI 4.3 SP2 was released in December 2021. I joined the team in April 2022 and was immediately assigned to assist the team in running through the customer’s very detailed test plan using BI 4.3 SP2 Patch 3.
What made the acceptance testing possible was a test plan that included every feature of Web Intelligence and of the BI platform itself that was used by the customer. Line items that failed were immediately written up as support incidents to SAP. I remember writing up many issues from the new Fiori UI that only affected Apple Safari, but several affected Google Chrome as well. We would retest issues as SAP released new patches. I believe we finally were able to go live using BI 4.3 SP2 Patch 8, six patches later than from where we started.
Fast forward to 2025 and BI 2025’s new patch release schedule – no support packs, only patches until BI 2027 arrives in a little over a year from now. While SAP has changed its patch strategy for on-premise software, customers have not changed their patch strategy— let somebody else go first. Most SAP BusinessObjects customers will be looking for a stable release of BI 2025 two years after its release — when SAP will be ready to unveil BI 2027.
Build a Sandbox
Regardless of your organization’s time frame for adopting BI 2025, build a sandbox today using the latest patch level. A sandbox allows the analytics team to start getting experience with the new platform before users see it. For BI Administrators, the CMC is virtually unchanged from previous versions of the product. But for Web Intelligence users, there are several new features compared to BI 4.3. In my opinion, features like data blending and off-line consumption (WIDX) are great, the best thing about BI 2025 is how its subtle UX improvements like the Quick Access Panel dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to build or modify a Web Intelligence dashboard.
Execute a Thorough Test Plan
Whether you are a BusinessObjects Edge customer with a small footprint or a large enterprise customer, a repeatable test plan is a must. The purpose of your test plan isn’t to fully test the entire product, but to fully test the features that your organization uses. Having a large number of small customers vet the new software early is actually a good thing. You might be tempted to say, “we’re just a small BusinessObjects Edge customer,” but you’re actually a great sandbox candidate as you’ll generally have a shorter test plan and identify issues in the most core workflows of the product.
Report Issues to SAP
If your team encounter issues, be sure to open an incident with SAP Support. That’s the only way that bugs get fixed. And share product improvement and enhancement ideas on the SAP Customer Influence site. You don’t have to apply every patch that SAP releases; however, you should continue to periodically patch the sandbox until you’re satisfied with the test results. Some issues may have workarounds, and so it’s OK to mark them as “passed” on the test plan, noting that a planned fix is in the works to permanently address the issue.
Have a Road Show
You may not have an entourage and an NFL boyfriend, but you can still plan a road show like Taylor Swift. Only with fewer Swifties and tour buses. You might be tempted to start with a big webinar, but I encourage you to start with smaller groups of tech-savvy or high-impact users, not to mention executive sponsors. These users are likely to be enthusiastic about using new features. Whether they realize it or not, they’ll also help your team identify both software issues and people issues that might arise during your planned rollout. Channel both their enthusiasm and participation into a public webinar when you’re ready to engage the full analytics community in your organization.
Share Your Experience
After you go live on a new release like BI 2025, share your experience on the SAP Community site. Your experience is more than simply the issues you encountered. It’s sharing the good, bad, and ugly. Which features did your users find the most beneficial? Which ones required the most training and coaching? Sharing your experience also lets BusinessObjects organizations of similar shape and size to yours have the confidence to swim with the jellyfish and make a serious plan for their own upgrade.
Does your organization currently have a BI 2025 Sandbox? Is a BI 2025 upgrade budgeted in your 2026 initiatives? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
