There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool. These are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting from other solutions.

If my organization has 300 or 400 tables, I can combine all of them into one universe, and everyone can use that. It is just a schematic layout that does not hold any data but the table relationships.

UDT is perfect, and you can do anything in it. There are never any issues when joining the tables because there are a lot of options. In terms of tables, two things always come to mind: looping and traps. These are the main difficulties we face when joining tables, but loops and traps are easily resolved inside BusinessOjbects UDT and IDT. We have API functions and contact operators that resolve these issues.

IDT and UDT form the backbone of BusinessObjects. There is one more thing called publication. I haven't seen this feature in any other tools. Publication is useful for bulk reporting. For example, say I want to send reports to 200 Indian salespeople, and I want to apply a filter so the reports only go to specific cities. This can be done in BusinessObjects in five minutes. This cannot be done in any other tool like Tableau or Power BI. 

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First, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an enterprise tool in a real sense. For comparison, we have to use Power Automate or Power Apps while using Power BI to refresh or schedule the dashboard. But SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has that functionality within itself. While GitHub has repository tools for versioning, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has versioning capabilities in its 4.1 and 4.2 versions. The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement.

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The semantic layer or BusinessObjects universe behind the Web Intelligence report provides the ability to create contexts and calculations that can be easily shared across multiple reports.

The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great.

The new features in BI 4.3 that allow you to use a Web Intelligence report as a data source have helped to create "master" reports that can be delivered to casual users, who can then create their own derived reports from this "master" report.

Shared Elements allow commonly used charts, tables, and graphs to be saved and re-used in other reports.

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There are features within Business Objects that can be leveraged to scale out, and scale up. All SAP products are scalable these days. 

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Business analytics are the most valuable features of this solution; I don't have experience with the other functional features offered.

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BusinessObjects is an enterprise reporting system that includes a content management system, security model, and report distribution system. They all merge nicely. These features are all integrated, and BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports.  It's a relatively stable and secure tool. 

I worked on a project with around 3,000 users around the globe. People from China, France, South America, and locally here in the United States were reporting on BusinessObjects 24 hours a day. It's a reliable, stable, secure, and mature tool for business intelligence and other functions, like standard reports. BusinessObjects has been around for nearly 30 years. A French person created it in 1994, so they've constantly improved and upgraded this tool ever since.

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What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process by automating data injection, eliminating manual preparation, and reducing associated costs. The user-friendly interface allows for quick analysis, while robust security ensures controlled access to sensitive information.

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This is the easiest way to gather information and have everything together. We have manipulated the information effectively in the way we want. 

It is a stable product.

The solution can scale. 

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The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors. 

SAP BusinessObjects is one of the oldest business intelligence tools. SAP has been in the market for quite a long time, and it is truly an enterprise company. They make sure that they talk to every component of the enterprise. 

They are evolving quickly. They are quite innovative. They understand a user's viewpoint. The best part is their enterprise presence. They're already market leaders in ERP, and they already have a large user base. Having a business intelligence suite and an established product makes things easier for them.

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The solution is very easy to use.

We find the product to be very stable. 

The solution is scalable.

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The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that none of the users can modify a status if I don't allow it.

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The scheduling and publication features are very useful. Additionally, the reporting tool and Lumira dashboard are also quite beneficial.

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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer. We can develop the presentation layer with drag-and-drop capabilities. For end-users and for our interns in the company can create reports and do their data analysis processes or works by using the objects that we created on the presentation layer by themselves.

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It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature.

It has additional capabilities like scheduling and getting the reports in the various forms, like through the mails and through the shared locations, and all those sorts of formats, so those features are good. The user friendliness helps create the reports out of the data source available.

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The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all repositories needed and provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs.

Sometimes, when monitoring our network or monitoring the KPIs, if we have something drop lower than a threshold, an email or an SMS will go out. We are using these features, but we are not using predictive modeling, clustering, or data mining. We don't have those.

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I like the fact that we can integrate it seamlessly within our Epic environment, but probably the best thing that Crystal Reports offers is the ability to do visualizations. They're simple to do, and they're catchy. So, it is a really great tool.

It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently.

It is a really solid product. It has been out there for some time, and it gives you exactly what you need.

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The reporting features the solution offers are excellent.

Technical support is quite good. They are responsive when we reach out.

The solution can scale.

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SAP BI includes the SAP Portfolio. It's not a different product, it's a part of the same segment. Whenever you use SAP there is functionality to check the reporting part. That is SAP BI. It is an internal process.

The product has been stable.

We find that we can scale it as needed.

SAP is quite good in terms of manufacturing, in terms of retail, in terms of oil and gas sectors because the functionality is very user-friendly and the continuity of business with this ETL application is quite good.

The solution is constantly upgraded and updated.

In terms of setting up the solution, it's easy.

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Big organizations can implement Business Warehouse on the cloud. Small organizations, like educational institutes, don't have that much complex data, so it doesn't make sense for them to buy Data Warehouse on the cloud. We want to use HANA and something called SLT. This will cover our replication and allows us to do modeling directly in the cloud, which is a great feature. 

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I would say universe designer as I have used or looked at other vendor tools and they don't even come close. Semantic layer is their main heart of SAP Business Objects.

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The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries.

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What I find useful in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is that it has a lot of flexibilities. It's where you can develop so many reports, and it's able to connect to multiple source systems.

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• Universe Designer - I use single interface for all the BI users who access/create ad hoc and canned report
• SDK - important because we architected and designed a BI Product for 200+ customers using SDK
• Lifecycle management tools - We keep releasing new versions of our product based on customer requirements/changes requests depending on product changes.
• Multi-source connectivity - Extended the same BI product to support analytics/reporting on other applications/sources from same portfolio.

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I use IDT and Web Intelligence the most to enable self service and ad-hoc reporting capabilities for our end users. When building a dashboard with defined KPIs, I'll use Design Studio as it gives a clean and uniform look.

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There are many valuable features. First, we can create ad hoc reports on a priority basis and deliver them to users quickly. The source is you can write a free end screen. Secondly, We can create reports with dynamic input controls, which is handy for showing data trends to users. Lastly, the sections and breaks features are handly and can merge multiple data providers.

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The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution.

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The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it. In the VB, we developed a dashboard in Xcelsius in the same way we can report in the VB.

The dashboard can easily be accessed by users. Right now with version 4.3, SAP is saying that they're coming with a query feature, where they can have a single platform and access all the reports. In 4.2, they have that one from SP4 onwards, but none of the users are using that one, so there needs to be more education with that. 

Also, reporting on the CMS database is a little bit of a headache. That is one problem that we are facing right now. With SP3 onwards, they have provided it. But right now, with version 4.3 onwards, it is very much integrated within that BO suite, so it was very easy. Right now there is a separate driver we need to install and take it further from there. That part is a little bit of a challenge.

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The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful. The drill-down features are very good because, in other solutions, such as Excel, you have to create separate pivot tables and a lot of other operations to do drill-downs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform tool does the drill-downs automatically. Overall the solution is user-friendly and has a lot of drag and drop features.

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Ive yet to find a bi tool that can match SAP’s offering, and Ive implemented all of them.

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The features that are most valuable are report and dashboard development, universe layer, ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources, ability to develop robust semantic layer, ability to combine different data sources and data federation.

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BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting.

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The planning and dashboarding features have been useful. Additionally, the fixed-format reports are good.

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If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with. They can also do a lot of querying themselves.

It is robust in terms of security and integration. It is also quite scalable.

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The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use.

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The most valuable SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform feature are metadata service layers. To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user. The end user can then use this data to create a report, dashboard, or whatever else.

It also has scheduling and can generate BI content for you. 

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Depends on the use case. The reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst.

When it comes to visualizations and discovery, SAP Explorer lets the user deep-dive into the data from a visual standpoint.

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The SAP BusinessObjects product suite is made of different products. This review refers to the Web Intelligence product.

The user friendliness of the interface enables non-IT-literate persons to create their own queries without need SQL knowledge, and that has been the case a very long time. (I started to use BO in 1990.)

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Business Object is truly a scalable and complete business intelligence solution for larger organizations. We have made use of the following components: Live Office, Xcelsius, Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence. We extensively use the publication features of Crystal Reports and scheduling features of Web Intelligence. For an organization that uses Excel extensively, the Live Office direct connect is fast, accurate and user friendly. Be sure to have some super users in the business who can develop Crystal Reports and well as Web Intelligence ad hoc queries. This will make the life of the IT developers and administrative employees much easier. Overall, with past experiences, I would have to rate our opinion of BOBJ very highly. View full review »

I have a 24-hour company, and the business layer on top of the database can translate database data into business language so that people can easily understand what's happening. It allows us to quickly create reports without IT or programming skills.

The stability is quite good.

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The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports. It also provides a structured data security model whereby a single report provides dedicated results to a given usage, such as a branch or department-based. For instance, the same report will provide a branch-specific result depending on the user's branch and can be common to multiple branches.

Similarly, bursting enables provision of tailored static reporting to specific users or user groups that also includes data security.

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The dynamic scheduling and the user interactive features (input controls, drill down and drill up features) as well as the ability to export the reports to Excel or PDF are some of the best features.

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Ability for the user to easily schedule the reports and managing them is a big plus. Most of BOBJ tools are also data source agnostic which makes them versatile across all environments.

WebIntelligence, Analysis for Office, and SAP Lumira were designed for businesses. So the adoption rate by the is very high. Quick intuitive analysis of data, and in just a few clicks WebI and Lumira can Merge Dimensions from different sources.

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• Universe Designer
• Web Intelligence
• InfoView

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Web Intelligence for its ad-hoc ability and user interface for allowing business users to create reports without depending on the IT department. The ability to merge data from multiple databases also allows more flexibility and business solutions.

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Flexibility and 'integratability'. View full review »

We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools. 

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It provides every feature you're looking for to perform OLAP and OLTP-based transactional and analytical reporting.

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• Way of creating reports
• Ease of use
• Can connect to any database
• Create models with ease.

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• Design Studio is very flexible because we can use JavaScript.
• We can use CSS styles for stunning visualization.

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The features that I think are valuable in SAP Business Objects - BOBJ (WEBi, BI Launch Pad, Rich Client) are the drill down capabilities to the nitty gritty lowest level, and perform an in depth analysis from different angles. Other products may also have this, but I believe with BOBJ, it is a lot better.

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1. SAP BO/BI

• Enterprise scalability
• Security
• Ease of use
• Semantic layer

2. Tableau

• Visualization
• Data discovery
• Turnaround time

3. IBM Cognos

• Enterprise scalability
• Security
• In-memory feature

4. MS BI - Flexibility

5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade

6. QlikView

• Data visualization
• Turnaround time.

7. OBIEE

• Enterprise security
• Semantic model

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The solution has been extremely stable. We haven't had any issues so far.

The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all.

Technical support, overall, has been very good and we've been happy with their level of service.

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Ease of report development is a key feature. Also, installation is largely automated. The nicest part of BOE remains the semantic layer (Designer), giving developers a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and push it out to users through Webi or WRC.

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• The "View where used" option is very useful when looking to see where work flows, data flows etc.. have been used throughout the project
• Migration from one version to another because it's simple
• Being able to query the metadata has been very useful

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One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it. 

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It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly-complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools.

Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA.

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SAP Business Objects Data Services is user friendly and easy to learn. It is easy to connect to SAP ECC or SAP BW, and does not require any additional plugins like for the other ETL tools.

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It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis. I found the SAP suite of products powerful. They scale well for enterprise use, i.e., thousands of recipients of the output of the products as dashboards and/or reports.

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• Data integration
• 64-bit architecture

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• Universal concept
• Connectivity with databases
• Good visualization

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The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good.

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Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use

New Undelete of Public objects..

New Dashboard of overall environment

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What I find most valuable is that you can run the reports anytime and you can receive the report at a scheduled time. When someone wants to receive these reports at a certain time, we schedule the report to be sent at their requested time. The user can access the application and run the report anytime he wants, whenever.

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The reporting is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The WebIntelligence Solution is the name of the reporting solution and it is very powerful. 

The solution offers very good features for broadcasting information or scheduling reports. You can schedule everything and make it very easy to disseminate by sending emails with a PDF or Excel. It's very quick and powerful.  

The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation.

The documentation provided is very, very good. There's so much available, that if you ever run into any issues and need a workaround, you have it right there to guide you.

The solution offers good user management.

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Being able to utilize a connection to the database with a semantic layer, so it can be modified if needed to fit a particular need. The Universe does this quite well and allows for business names to be used in place of the cryptic database name.

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In my position, it's very important to define data models in order to develop a solution that provide end users with the ability to freely analyze data. That's why the Information Design tool of Business Objects is the most valuable feature. But I also use the Web Intelligence feature for testing my personal data models.

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SAP Business Warehouse for its pre-built BI standard contents as it contain best practices generally and specific to industries both. Also standard analytic reports are very valuable.

SAP BO because of its functionalities, ad-hoc reporting, drill down, formatted reporting features. SAP BO tools like Explorer and Lumira for data explorer and trends.

All these things have benefit the main stakeholders to check and observe the trends and take the decision for the betterment of the company. Dashboards are one of the best features of SAP BO tools.

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1. Dynamic Visibility

2. Query Prompt Selector

3. Query Refresh Selector

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It provides good centralized management, and it performs well against our day-to-day solution.

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The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal.

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It has got a broad range of options for SMBs and enterprise level companies.

1. Dashboard Design (xcelcius) - this feature is a great tool to visualize information especially for enterprise dashboards in a board room and it can do what if analyses simply. The possibility of creating a specific dashboard format is unlimited.
2. Web Intelligence - this feature is the most mature feature of Business Objects, and it has the capabilities of ad hoc reporting, pixel perfect reporting, formatted style, as well as complex and advanced calculations. It can also publicize reports to help with distribution
3. Explorer - the best of breed for self service and visualization before SAP Lumira came in. The ease of use is unrivalled by the other features of Business Objects.

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It will give you better performance if your warehouse is also on SAP Business Warehouse. It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards. For example, BusinessObjects Design Studio provides custom templates where you can create your own templates. You can also create your own custom charts. There are CSS formats which you can take in, then you can create your own color coding. Thus, a lot is possible. 

From a developer's point of view, it has definitely provided a lot of flexibility.

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In my experience, the Analytics module provides the business the ability to make the appropriate decisions for improving our organization.

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• It provides centralized access for business users to all enterprise reporting content. This includes SSO access, reports with content personalization and tools for ad hock data access (Web Intelligence, Lumira)
• Customers highly benefit from Semantic Layer applications – they successfully hide the complexity of the databases and provide possibility to build queries using business vocabulary
• It provides easy administration of content using web based CMC application
• It provides scheduling, publishing capabilities of Business Objects reports

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• Publication
• Webi Reports
• UDT
• CMC
• BI launch pad to design and develop the analysis application for the business

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• Web Intelligence reports because they have flexibility for detailed data analysis
• Dashboard designer for managerial reports
• OLAP Analysis reports for ad-hoc analysis.

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I guess most customers seek SAP BOBJ for its visualization and intuitive user experience.

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The Universe in BO ensures consistent coding for business rules etc. View full review »

The ad-hoc reporting in a web environment is great.

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Good, powerful functions in the table format report compared with Microsoft Power BI. It can process big volumes of data fast.

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The security features and flexibility of the product are the most valuable functions of BO.

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• Easy interface for business users
• Advanced functionality in BI
• It connects any data sources with SAP Business Objects tool

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It is stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use. 

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Universe Designer is the product's most valuable feature because you can manage joins or derived tables as you wish.

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