SAP BusinessObjects 4.0
I am using SAP BO 4.0 and especially WebI 4.0 for almost 1 year now and have to say that it's still too buggy for a productive use. It's incredible how much time I need for creating and maintaining simple WebI reports and I am so tired of explaining my client why I need days for reformatting a simple report.
And yes we are using always the latest patches. I can't understand what SAP is doing with BO, which I really liked in the past, but now i can't recommend it to my clients anymore. The software engineering team is fixing bugs and new bugs appear, some bugs are so obvious, I must assume that they are not testing their software at all.
At the first sight BO 4.0 includes many new and fancy features, but once you are really working with it as an engineer, you will find out that the whole application is unbelievable inefficient.
This is just a small list of things I am fighting with every single working day:
- when I want to change the size of the cells in a table the size is not set correctly
- adding a dimension to a merged dimension forced me to unmerge the dimension and recreate a part of my entire report
- publications fail for unknown reasons (support couldn't help)
- data sources can't be changed any more of some reports
- entire reports got corrupted and have to be recreated
- very slow design mode
- section property "hide when empty" just doesn't work sometimes
- IE 10 is not really working with WebI even when they say
- BO User Variable was not working anymore in Rich Client since SP 6
- Report tabs can't be renamed anymore
- Report filters are not passed to blocks sometimes
- Desktop gets spammed with log files from WebI Java version
- dimension loses sortings after adding a query
- the promoted feature to copy report parts to another report is not useable at all
- features from rich client are missing in the web version
- using multiple webi instances at the same time lead to problems with the queries
- frequently appearing error message like getpages, processcommand, Index: 0 Size: 0, etc. are totally normal
- table cells with measure inside are empty - entire table has to be recreated to get it working
- the whole platform is so unstable
- etc.
The really bad thing is, that I was also using the new Crystal Reports for Enterprise and Dashboards (former XCelsius) and there I see the same buggy and unstable behaviour. The support team couldn't help us with most of the problems we had and the reaction time was quite slow.
Instead of adding new features to the BO tools, I would suggest to make the existing features useable and to add at least the features from the previous BO version 3.1, which is many years ago now.
I still hope that version 4.1 brings massive enhancements.
Please share your experiences with 4.0!
