Best suggestion for migrating to power BI from SAP Business Objects (BOB)

[Anonymous]

Dear All,

Request for suggestion in migrating Business objects 4.x infrastructure to Power BI. Also are there any white papers for converting webi inteligence reports based on universes to Power BI.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Regards,

Raj

[lokeshb31]

Currently in 2023, with the latest release of Microsoft Fabric, I would like to inquire about any solutions provided by Microsoft for converting Business Objects web intelligence reports to Power BI. To my knowledge, the universe (semantic layer in BO) plays a significant role in constructing tables with multiple joins, a feature not readily available in Power BI (which offers only one active join). We attempted a proof of concept (POC) to convert a web intelligence report from BO to a Power BI paginated report, but the process proved excessively complex and time-consuming, lacking user-friendliness.

In essence, Business Objects excels in transactional reporting as it inherently resembles SQL, while Power BI employs its own language (DAX/M), which proves advantageous for creating advanced interactive visuals. However, it seems that the organization is prioritizing the adoption of the latest tool based on market trends rather than considering the actual use case and desired outcomes.

[lokeshb31]

Hello,

Any insights on this question by Microsoft experts or product group? 

[Anonymous]

Hey Raj

We have not found a way to convert and tbh I doubt there ever will be at least for MS. From past experience when working for another BI vendor, its a massive engineering task for not much gain unless its a perfect conversion and thats the tough bit.

We have a lot of time and effort invested in 100s of BOBJ universes that are not going to go away anytime soon. If you think aboiut a universe it supports multiple reports through an abstraction layer for business users. I believe this is where MS are going but they are not there yet with the new sharable data models.

For the 1000s of WEBI reports we have, we have alot of reports that simply list data so the users can get Excel output where they can then go through the misery of joining to other xlsx files using VLOOKUPs.

To at least ease that pain we have worked out how to call the webi reports directly from PBI using the REST APIs that BOBJ provides. We are also looking at the query API to see if we can remove the WEBI report completely. The other alternative is to copy the SQL from the webi  and plug it into the PBI report, add any business logic and throw the webi report out ... my preference but its time consuming to say the least and difficult with so many users needing the reports on a daily basis :0)

Hope this helps give some perspective on what another organization is going through

Cheers

Tim

[Anonymous]

Hi Tim,

Thanks a lot for the update. Can you let me know how we can use the rest api's to convert webi reports to power bi reports. 

Also need more input on the below mentioned line:

"We are also looking at the query API to see if we can remove the WEBI report completely."

Your guidance is really appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,

Raj

[Ghuiles]

Hi!

We have in my company BO as well. Thus the users are used to build their reports per drag and drop and to be able to look at what is happening under the hood, meaning how the query is built, even how the SQL is automatically written.

We are now moving progressively to an SQL Server in the cloud and Power BI.

Our DWH has a couple of terabytes of data.

We are using PBI Premium.

What would be for you the best way to setup our system, so that:

- some PBI users can see the whole data available

- some PBI users have partial view on countries / customers. Some have just one country assigned, some more.

- the advanced users can see how the queries are generated

- the advanced users can generate their own dashboard --> how to do it with the gateway, as i understood here that it is generally better to use the Import Query, but then the gateway just know only one technical user, meaning this user can see all data. How to handle when the advanced user shall not see let say only West Europe?

- could we generate datasets in the service to help us somehow? like one dataset per country? 

- could we use the Dataflows with its datalake or another to solve this issue?

I am still not clear on the ins and out about how to configure it the best way.

Our company has until now a decentral culture. Do we HAVE TO switch to a central culture (all advanced users should have the right to see ALL data?)?

How do you guys are facing such questions?

Thanks in advance for your ideas. G.

[michaelshparber]

Hi @Ghuiles 

Do you have any updates on this?

Have you managed to shape your Data Culture / the way that the analysts changed their approach?

Please share your experience.

Thank you

[v-yulgu-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

Per my knowledge, there is no direct way to convert other kinds of report to Power BI report. For your requirement, do you want to fecth data from SAP Business Objects(BOB) to Power BI desktop or generate a report via Power BI desktop similar to an existing web inteligence report? Please provide more detailed description about what you want to achieve. How to Get Your Question Answered Quickly

Best regards,

Yuliana Gu

[Anonymous]

Dear Yuliana,

Thanks for your response. 

I would like to generate a report via Power BI desktop similar to an existing web inteligence report based on Business Objects Universes.

In Web intelligence the users are not required to know the complexity of the database as there is a Semantic layer. Can we achieve the same functionality in Power BI?

Regards,

Raj

[v-yulgu-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

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 I would like to generate a report via Power BI desktop similar to an existing web inteligence report based on Business Objects Universes. 

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It depends on your actual data table and your expected result. For more advice, you'd better provide some dummy data and show us how is the existing report like.

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 In Web intelligence the users are not required to know the complexity of the database as there is a Semantic layer. Can we achieve the same functionality in Power BI?  

---

I'm afraid not. The dataset looks the same as that in data source after being loaded into desktop. But you could apply some transformations to format the data structure in Query Editor.

Regards,

Yuliana Gu