SAP Community – Published 23 January 2025
For many SAP BusinessObjects customers, March 12, 2025 is going to be a beautiful day. While some legacy technologies won’t be ported to BI 2025, customers won’t be stuck in a moment you can’t get out of. Let’s look at what’s being retired and best practices for getting ready for BI 2025.
In the year 2000, Irish rock band U2 released their 10th studio album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
The album was seen as a return to the band’s “traditional sound” after spending the 1990’s following their classic The Joshua Tree with more experimental sounds on Achtung Baby (1991), Zooropa (1993), and Pop (1997). In a similar way, the forthcoming release of SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 can also be seen as a return to tradition as the suite focuses on its most popular applications, Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence. Some SAP BusinessObjects customers no doubt feel stuck in a moment you can’t get out of, spending years wondering if SAP was ever going to get the BusinessObjects band back together, unimpressed with the sounds of SAP Analytics Cloud, and tempted by the siren songs of Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.
But there are still SAP BusinessObjects customers that recognize March 12, 2025 as a beautiful day. SAP is giving the world something that simultaneously seems familiar yet thoroughly modernized, both in terms of its technological underpinnings as much as its modern analytics user experience (UX). And just like some of U2’s best work, we will still be using these tools well into the next decade.
The Past
Having been through the experience of retiring Desktop Intelligence and Adobe Flash-based apps like Dashboards (Xcelsius), there are some applications and technologies currently in SAP BI 4.3 that aren’t going to be present in BI 2025 and this article will review the business impact of SAP’s decisions and what customers need to do to be ready for the updated platform.
Adobe Flash-based Content
The Adobe Flash player was retired in December 2020, but we’ll start with this old news for sake of completeness. SAP stopped supporting Adobe Flash-based content with the release of SAP BI 4.2 SP9, but customers may have not undertaken the effort to remove the content, as it simply stopped working when Adobe retired its Flash player. SAP KB 2914654 provides a Java program that customers can download and run on their SAP BusinessObjects systems. The script will identify and remove all Desktop Intelligence, Dashboards/Xcelsius, and Explorer from their systems. Oddly enough, the script does not delete Adobe Flash objects, possibly because SAP felt it best to only remove its own content types. The script also won’t delete any empty folders left behind. So, there’s possibly a larger opportunity to manually remove Adobe Flash files and obsolete directories from the Central Management Console. The script has a commit operation at the end, so you can run it one time without committing and examine the log to see exactly what will be deleted when you do commit.
I got to run the script on a fairly large SAP BusinessObjects installation that had quite a bit of Dashboards/Xcelsius content and even one orphaned Desktop Intelligence object in the CMS (even though the Deski file itself had been deleted long ago). The Dashboards content had its own folder structure, which required separate clean-up of the folders and the SWF files left untouched by the script.
Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports for Enterprise
No, Crystal Reports is not being retired. Not by a long shot. But there will be some changes in BI 2025 that customers should be prepared for prior to upgrading to BI 2025.
First, SAP BusinessObjects customers on SAP BI 4.3 SP2 and higher already know that Crystal Reports is no longer supported on Linux servers – only Microsoft Windows Server (see SAP KB 3109523 and 3362867). I helped a customer with around 200 “active” Crystal Reports upgrade to BI 4.3 SP2 on Linux. As expected, the schedules for the Crystal Reports stopped running. What was not expected? Nobody ever called to see what happened to their Crystal Reports. Linux customers can continue support simply by adding some Windows servers to their existing Linux cluster.
Second, SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise is deprecated and will not be part of the BI 2025 platform. A short history lesson – Crystal Reports for Enterprise was introduced with SAP BI 4.0 in 2010. It was intended to be a “modern” version of Crystal Reports, built on Java and Eclipse instead of Windows and C/C++. It began by introducing UNX support and slowly gained new features to help retire traditional Crystal Reports. So now in a small course correction, UNX support was added to Crystal Reports 2020 SP4 and higher (SAP KB 1644732).
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile will end support on December 31, 2025 and will not be supported in BI 2025. Although other analytics apps such as SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, ThoughtSpot and others are maintaining a mobile-app approach), SAP has been transitioning its BusinessObjects platform to a web responsive platform that support mobile browsers without the need of an app. Gregory Bottichio wrote a May 2024 SAP Community article, SAP BusinessObjects Mobile alternatives, with a list of alternative strategies.
UNV is Dead. Long live UNX.
The Information Design Tool and its UNX semantic layer was introduced with SAP BI 4.0 in 2010 and intended to eventually replace the UNV semantic layer. Similar to Crystal Reports for Enterprise that shipped along side it, the Information Design Tool was built on a modern Java/Eclipse framework. In the 15 years since the introduction of the Information Design Tool, many customers have already embraced the UNX format. The UNV format will not be supported in BI 2025, so if you have any active universes remaining in this format, conversion is required. There are lots of resources in the SAP Support Portal (SAP KB 3291488 and 3350459, among many others). Customers with large numbers of UNV universes or reports that point to them will want to investigate multiple third-party tools that will do the heavy lifting.
Well, Except for UNX Multi-Source Universes
SAP BI 4.0 was introduced with its Data Federator technology embedded to support multi-source universes. While data federation as a marketing concept seemed like a great idea (don’t bother moving data to a central data warehouse, just stitch it together with federation) it never really took off, neither from SAP nor other data federation vendors. Unfortunately, a multi-source universe is like the dark side of the Force. Remember when your coworkers warned you that “if once you start down the dark path of multisource universes, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will!” Sadly, there is no automated way (unless SAP is going to provide one with BI 2025?) to convert a multi-source universe back to multisource – you simply must rebuild it as single source.
Live Office
Live Office, a plug-in to Microsoft Office, seemed like a good idea at the time. It did its job well, but many SAP BusinessObjects customers shunned anything that involved installing software. Browser-based tools were the future and deploying Web Intelligence Rich Client, Live Office, etc. just was not going to be allowed by corporate IT.
Live Office will not be in BI 2025 and Laura Vega has written a helpful SAP Community article, SAP BusinessObjects Live Office Alternatives.
Lumira
SAP Lumira, first introduced as SAP Visual Intelligence, was introduced at SAPPHIRE in 2012 to great fanfare, followed shortly by SAP Design Studio. These apps were later brought together as a family in July 2017, with SAP Lumira Desktop becoming SAP Lumira Discovery 2.0 and SAP Design Studio becoming SAP Lumira Designer 2.0. Neither of these tools has received much enhancement since the initial 2.0 fanfare. Accordingly, SAP Lumira Discovery 2.x will not be supported in BI 2025. In contrast, SAP Lumira Designer 2.0 will be supported to appease some very loud or noisy (or both?) customers. However, supported does not mean enhanced.
The Future
While the deprecation of legacy tools always brings some level of disappointment, SAP is reacting to where its customers were mostly headed anyway. This article has focused largely on the past. In my next SAP Community article, we’ll talk about the future – combining SAP’s powerful universe semantic layer with thoroughly modern cloud-based databases like Databricks, Snowflake and Trino. And those are already supported in BI 4.3 – let’s hope the BI 2025 platform support matrix, once released, has some interesting new things in it.
For the customers that rely on Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence, these tools are thoroughly modernized with an emphasis on user experience and usability. March 12, 2025 is truly going to be a beautiful day. Don’t let it get away.
While other analytics vendors are using 2025 to raise their prices, SAP and its cadre of passionate partners can help you continue to use the BusinessObjects platform and deliver solutions with a lower total cost of ownership. What you don’t have, you don’t need it now.
What legacy technology still lurks in YOUR BusinessObjects platform that’s going to need retirement before BI 2025? And how do you feel about the future of BusinessObjects? Will March 12, 2025 be a beautiful day for your organization? Or do you feel stuck in a moment you can’t get out of? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below.
References
SAP KB 1644732 – Unable to create report on a UNX Universe in Crystal Reports
SAP KB 2914654 – Script to delete deprecated content from BI platform repository after update to BI 4.3 or BI 4.2 SP09 and above
SAP KB 3109523 – Deprecation of Crystal Reports 2020 services on Linux and Unix
SAP KB 3291488 – BI 4.x: Information on Migrating from unv to unx Universes
SAP KB 3350459 – Support of Universe Design Tool : UNV is dead, long live UNX
SAP KB 3362867 – Crystal Reports 2020 services on Windows deleted after upgrade on Linux/Unix in distributed environment
SAP Community – SAP BusinessObjects Live Office Alternatives
SAP Community – SAP BusinessObjects Mobile alternatives
