SAP Business Objects

Question

Hi, I have been offered by my employer to work on SAP Business Objects to analyse large amount of data they have.

I have the following doubts before I could accept that:

a. I love programming and do not want to lose touch with it. Do you think working on this tool would excite a person who loves building software? Or Is it like most part of the tool configurable through Wizard like interface?

b. Is this tool capable of working on data collected for research and testing purpose?

I tried googling but all I could get is some videos which mentions "Business Intelligence" more than 12 times a minute. Any suggestion or even links to help me make the preliminary analysis would be helpful. Thanks...

Answer 1

Business Objects is not rocket science. A competent developer should be able to figure out how to build a universe in a few days. My first experience took me about two days to figure out how to build a universe and another two days or so to get some analytic reports out of it.

However, 'research data' suggests that the actual structure of the data will vary depending on the nature of the survey so you will probably find yourself constantly making ad-hoc changes or new bespoke universes for each job. Business Objects is probably a reasonably flexible way to do this (a custom universe for a tabular set of research data could probably be set up in a few hours). However, the job would basically devolve to a reporting analyst position.

If you're not a 'tools guy' by nature you will probably find this sort of work unsatisfying. I do full life-cycle work on data warehouse systems and from time to time this involves developing front ends using Business Objects. I'm quite happy to work with it casually as part of a larger job but I wouldn't want a job solely working with just one reporting tool.

If you think of yourself as a programmer I would recommend against accepting the job if it was limited to just working with Business Objects.

Answer 2

I have experience working with Designer and reporting in Business Objects... Honestly, it's quite easy. I have to say I'm a total programmer at heart, and absolutely hate working with it, but that's what possessed me to write a program that uses the DLL's to automate everything. I enjoyed automating it, and ended up making a program that did in about 5 minutes what it previously took me weeks to do. Now all the BO developers use it, and I mostly spend my time updating that.

In summary... It sucks to work with when it's +60% of your job, but you don't have to lose out on Programming. If anything, I think I've improved my programming. Now I barely do the crappy side of the work. I just run my program, and everything works out.

I'm not sure what you are asking in question "B".