Introduction

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is a worldwide leading BI platform that enables organizations and enterprises to improve their entire way of working by getting better business decisions and insights about each and every aspect of the organization's business processes, whether it's sales goals that require tracking, chain management, billing, revenue from sales of products, amount that the organization spends on salaries, measuring net profit, and so on.

In the 21st century—an era of mass data explosion and information that can be pulled from an endless list of data sources, which can be found in social networks, files, multiple databases, and unstructured data—we can say for sure that an organization without a solid BI platform will find it very hard to manage its resources, respond to the rapidly changing financial reality, or even fail to perform common and simple tasks such as reporting to its customers.

The BI launch pad (formerly known as InfoView) is the BI web portal of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) platform.

The BI launch pad is the core of the entire SAP BusinessObjects platform since it unifies the following two main aspects of the organizational BI layer:

As a web environment, the BI launch pad can be accessed using a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome through a local site that can also be accessed from outside the organization like any other website.

The BI content can also be easily accessed from mobile devices and tablets.

The BI launch pad environment supports various login methods such as Windows Active directory, SAP login, LDAP, and SAP BusinessObjects enterprise, which enables organizations to integrate their existing login method with the BI portal and client applications as well. The entire BI content is secured. Only users with the appropriate rights can access reports; this is one of the most important aspects of the BI environment as reports may display sensitive data such as sales figures, salaries, and data that should be secured like credit card numbers.

The data in the database can be secured as well by what is known as row level security, enabling common data security scenarios such as region managers viewing the sales per region report to retrieve only the relevant data for the region manager.

The rights for the BusinessObjects applications are secured as well, and we will usefully come across the following two main user types:

The main and core functionalities of the BI launch pad are:

Since data can be defined and analyzed in many different ways and there are different requirements on how to pull and display the data, the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform supplies various different BI tools that are categorized according to the following data requirements:

Almost every enterprise is combined with different audiences and different data structures that need to be analyzed in different ways supported by a specific functionality; this answers why we will usually come across at least one BI tool, either web-based or a client one.

This book focuses on the Web Intelligence BI tool, which I call the bread and butter of every BI environment.