Power BI

Declined

SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe

Vote (1318)

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?

Administrator on 07 Dec 2020 22:45:41

Unfortunately, the Business Objects connector was removed due to a number of reasons.

Comments (164)

Comments (164)

Gautier on 05 Jul 2020 22:37:22

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.

Claudio Ramalho on 05 Jul 2020 22:35:24

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.

jerome P on 05 Jul 2020 22:34:00

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.

Eric Day on 05 Jul 2020 22:33:17

RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe

This is a pretty big deal as we are enhancing a Business Objects platform with Power Bi. It would be very nice to be able to capitalize on the work that has been done on this existing platform within the Power Bi offering.

We are in healthcare operations analytics and this could help us make a significant leap forward.

Licensing issues was mentioned, but in the same post, it redirected back here to make/vote it as a suggestion.

There is a good number of votes, can we at least get a more specific response to the licensing issue and if this is a non starter because of that, or if it is something in the works with SAP that may/may not come to fruition.

Jonathan Stapley on 05 Jul 2020 22:30:42

RE: SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe

This represents the majority of the work our analyst do... connecting to a SAP BO universe for medical and cost data. Power BI loses all of its charm without this feature.