ScottC on 11 Feb 2016 10:43:56
All of the current Ideas that mention SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe integration are marked as completed as this feature was offered pre June/July release. This is nearly a critical requirement for adoption in my organization.
I had previously heard that this was removed due to licencing restrictions, can we get an official response on that? Is there any possibility of this being re-integrated?
- Comments (161)
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
I agree - this is much needed functionality.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
This would be very useful. Currently we have to support multiple tools for Universe query and SSAS/Tablular model. PowerQuery has a Universe Connector, so the effort should be inconsequential to port it over
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
We have already multiple universes from our vendor. If PBI could connect to universes that would be great. Now I have to create multiple tabular models for this. The problem with that is I can't use any bridge table with a tabular model.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
I am very disappointed to have stumbled across marketing pages by Microsoft showing readily available use of this function but upon digging am finding that the feature was turned off for licensing issues. It is unclear what the licensing issue is however such statements enforce an opinion that SAP and Microsoft are choosing to not work together leaving customers of both companies paying the price. In my own company great sums of money are paid to both companies to utilize their products and issues like this make me consider throwing out both companies due to their lack of customer focus.
From a user point of view, I want an easy simple way to connect with the power and capabilities of Power Pivot and Power Query to data repositories modeled in Business Objects. Not being able to do that prevents me from using the knowledge investment we have in modeling data using the business objects tooling forcing us to re-model in some other tool / framework, choose to not use Excel as an analytic tool OR choose to implement tedious data outputs from BO to Excel via CSV or other constructs.
Please build, implement, license, settle whatever disagreement between Microsoft and SAP so that customers can benefit from streamlined data access.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
PBI exists in a heterogeneous world with other vendors' BI tools. We'd get more adoption/acceptance of PBI if it could reuse the extensive metadata and business logic found in our BO universes.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
I don't feel this is a good use of a feature as businesses should decouple from BOBJ, you turn BOBJ into an extremely expensive data layer and nothing more, and you would have significant licensing issues when you could simply swap to Power BI models and an overall better product.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
Following my previous message. I have been able to successfully connect to Webi reports using the restful API of business object.
The process is not that complex and might be a good solution for those needing to connect PBI and BO.
Here is the link to the forum posts: http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Connect-to-Business-Object-Webi-report-through-RESTful-request/m-p/109407#M46002
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
Hi everyone,
I have found a workaround to get access to my Webi reports using the SAP Restful API.
It works very well with Power BI. Basically the GET request I am sending looks like this:
http://:6405/biprws/raylight/v1/documents//reports/
with the following headers:
X-SAP-LogonToken=
Accept="text/csv"
In Power query the source line looks like this:
Source=Csv.Document(Web.Contents(":6405/biprws/raylight/v1/documents//reports/",[Headers=[#"X-SAP-LogonToken"="""""",Accept="text/csv"]]))
My only problem is how to get the logontoken from the post request with powerquery. My knowledge of powerquery is limited so maybe someone can help me to send the require POST call to SAP from Powerquery and then store the logontoken in a variable that will be used in the GET report call.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
I work in an company with more than 100,000 employees, with more than 40,000 users using Office 365, and many of analytical reports use BO Universes to access the databases.
Today, Lumira is the main tool to access these reports and, to not require further efforts, we will not migrate them to Power BI.
So here I reinforce the request to create a native Power BI connection to the BO Universes(not using Power Query), to leverage the use of Power BI in our organization.
Thanks.
RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe
"SAP HANA and SAP BW, but not SAP BO, why?"
Because they are OLAP systems supporting MDX queries and other XMLA commands. So its like accessing an SSAS OLAP cube. its why they are supported.
SAP BO is not MDX compliant. its another API and the way BO is working, its not so easy to reuse.
Ask SAP to make the BO universes MDX compliant. if they create the OLE DB for OLAP API, then Microsoft can integrate it in Power BI for sure.
But I dont expect to see Microsoft investing time and effort on creating an API against a proprietary system from a competitor.
finally... if you have create a BO universe, you can certainly create a Power BI model, yes, you'll have to maintain 2 models, but at the end you allready have the data, the mapping and the measures in place. its not a big effort.