Many of you would have already aware of new features of SAP BO BI 4.2 suite and it offers a comprehensive set of tools for transforming your data into useful information and delivering it to the people who need it for their business decisions.

I have highlighted here most of the SAP BO BI 4.2 features and enhancements that have been added to the SAP BI Suite.

SAP Auto Configure Tool & SAP Host Agent Tool is added as part of SAP BI 4.2 suite. More details about auto Configure tool, please click here.

SAP BI 4.2, Tomcat 8.0 is the default web application server.

Performance improved when you execute the SAP BI 4.2 setup.exe, the duration for the “Select setup language” screen is optimized when compared to older versions. It was taking long time to select your prepared language till the last BI 4.1 releases.

The installation or uninstallation finish screen of BI 4.2 is enhanced to display the detailed level of information and this feature is exclusively for windows platform.

ErrorsAndWarnings.log file contains installation or uninstallation or modifying or repairing log summary

You can now add a new language by modifying your BI platform installation while upgrading the SAP BI 4.2.

Minor Enhancements to Upgrade Management Tool (UMT).

In SAP BI 4.2, SAP introduced Translation Manager SDK. This enables you to build your own application, which helps you to reintegrate modifications without reentering the same in Translation Management Tool. Using Translation Manager SDK, you can create your own application to perform translations from the infoObjects or local folder. You can also use this SDK to export and import the translations to Central Management System (CMS), xliff and excel.

Notification feature enables an Administrator to send alert messages from the CMC to the User and the alert message appears as a notification popup in the BI launch pad screen when the user logs on.

BI Commentary is an application that has been introduced in the CMC. It allows document users to collaborate by commenting on any of the data/statistics available in a given document and it’s currently available for Web Intelligence application.

Recycle Bin is a new application in the CMC. When the user deletes an item from the BOE system, it is moved to the Recycle Bin, where it is temporarily stored until the Recycle Bin is emptied and only items in the public folder can be temporarily stored in the Recycle Bin.

You can now selectively retrieve objects from an LCMBIAR file. This requires that the user has the introduction of ‘Edit LCMBIAR’ right. When you selectively retrieve objects from an LCMBIAR file, a new job with the selected objects is created.

BI Administrator’s Cockpit is a new application added in the CMC. It enables an administrator to collect basic data about the BI environment. With BI Administrator’s Cockpit, you can obtain information about Servers, Scheduled Jobs, Content Usage, and Applications.

Web Service clients like AnalysisOffice, Xcelsius etc that uses Web Services consumer SDK can now be audited. You can enable client auditing by providing specific client ID using Web Services Consumer SDK (.NET and Java).

Major enhancements and features added in Web Intelligence Reports.
• Optional creation of Shared objects
• Right-to-Left alignment support
• BI Commentary
• Parallel Data Provider refresh
• GeoMap Charts
• Custom elements
• Direct Access to HANA views
• SAP HANA online Mode
• Shared Elements
• New SQL functions: UPPER_LIKE and CONTAINS

New features and options introduced for SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence and BI Semantic Layer SDKs in SAP BI 4.2.

Additional features added SAP Business Objects Business Analysis, edition for OLAP sources.
• Alias table support for Oracle Essbase data source
• Break hierarchy support within sort
• Currency translation support by SAP NetWearver Business Warehouse(BW)
• SAP HANA data source via HTTP connection

Information design tool provides two key enhancements
• Linked universes – a way of linking a universe to one or more core universes and re-use components from those universes’ data foundations and business layers.
• SAP Business Explorer (BEx) authored universes – a way of building and saving universes on BEx queries, using the BICS connector.

New Data Access Support added as part of BI 4.2
• HANA SPS10
• Hadoop Hive 0.14
• Cloudera Impala – CDH 5.2 (0.13 and 0.14)
• Amazon EMR Hive 0.13
• Apache Spark (JDBC and ODBC)
• Greenplum 4.3
• IBM IDS 12.1 (ECS France)
• IBM Netezza 7.2 (support 7.1 by reference)
• HANA PowerPC
Business Intelligence Platform RESTful Web Services supports below listed new APIs as part of SAP BI 4.2.
• Publication: List, create, modify and delete publications
• User Management: Create, modify and delete user
• User Group Management: Create, modify and delete users
• Uploading and Downloading Files: Uploads and downloads files
• Scheduling: Retrieves scheduled instances
• CMS Query : Retreives infostore objects based on SQL query
• BI Administrator’s Cockpit: Provides statistics of Server, Jobs, Content usage and Application usage

New SAP Crystal Reports RESTful Web Services API help to retrieve report’s or subreport’s metadata/structure from a crystal report. You can retrieve the Database connection, tables, aliases, joins, fields used in the document and all its associated properties (all fields from Cross tab as well), Parameters of the report, Formula fields of the report, Parameter fields of the report, Filters and all expressions, calculations involved in the report using new REST Crystal Reports API.

In BI 4.2, you can also install Dashboards and Presentation Design on a system with 64 bit Microsoft Excel formerly Dashboards and Presentation Design could only be installed on a system with 32 bit Microsoft Excel.

In BI 4.2 Dashboards and Presentation Design, the Filter component can now be displayed both vertically and horizontally and minor enhancements in Dashboard selector/chart.

SAP Crystal reports Designer Supports for vertical alignment of text within a cell and new range based functions (GetLowerBound(x); GetUpperBound(x)) and a miscellaneous function (GetValueDescriptions(x)) are introduced.

SAP Crystal reports for enterprise Supports for vertical alignment of text within a cell, Bar Code and QR Code, Waterfall charts, disable the report variable in report.

SAP Business Objects Mobile server pushes notifications to iOS devices of the SAP Business Objects Mobile application users.

Please read the New features and enhancements of BI 4.2 and implement the changes in your project.