Introduction to BOBJ

Till a few years back Business Objects used to be a company whose products were used in many enterprise reporting applications. A few years back the compnay was taken over by SAP and incorporated into a large number of existing SAP products. Right now, SAP Business Objects, BO or BOBJ is the frontend reporting component of choice for SAP. Though BOBJ is largely used as the frontend for SAP BW, BOBJ reports can also be integrated with  GRC, GTS, BPC and even ECC. BOBJ can also be used to directly query SAP and non SAP databases. I have been trying to become more familiar with the security features of the BOBJ product suite as a large number of companies are increasingly using BOBJ for their frontend reporting instead of relying on the features of BEX Analyzer. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be too many online reources available to learn BOBJ security on our own. Hence this new thread on BOBJ security.

The Business Objects Product suite comes with various tools like Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence (WebI), Xcelsius. The name of many of these have changed in the current BOBJ version, BOBJ 4.0 which I will be using for the next set of posts. My exposure to BO is still rather limited but I would still like to share what I have picked over time so that newer users get some idea on how to go about their work. As with most of my other posts the primary idea behind the posts are to let new users get started. I would expect all readers to keep exploring and learning more about this exciting product.