The BW team, in conjunction with numerous other Information Services & Technology (IS&T) groups, worked to implement an upgrade to the BW reporting environment. This project was approved by business area owners earlier this year and was active through most of the late summer.  Testing and validation were completed and the upgrade was approved by business owner representatives for go-live.  Following that approval, all deployment and checkpoints occurred as planned and the upgraded BW reporting environment was made available in the production SAP BUworks portal on Sunday, October 4, 2015.

We created a brief video to provide an overview of the changes in look and feel that you can expect to see.

Change highlights include these items:

  • The Reporting environment now has an entirely new look and feel
  • The Help button in each folder has been replaced with an inline Help link that navigates to relevant BW Help guides
  • Folder list widths are adjustable, so report names are easier to read
  • The report name associated with a Variable Entry screen is displayed in the browser tab containing the screen

These elements are among the technical changes:

  • The timeout for report execution was increased from 400 sec to 600 sec, which should help reduce failed runs
  • The max number of returned cells (called “safety belt”), was increased from 350K to 500K, allowing larger reports to be executed
  • The maximum idle time permitted between navigation steps increased from 30 minutes to 6 hours. This makes it more likely a user can pick up where they left off to change variables, characteristics or otherwise adjust analysis and re-run without starting over, even if they have not saved a report. The previous idle time of 30 minutes was easy to eclipse, given normal daily interruptions, delays to review/merge exports with others sources, etc.

Firefox pop-up blocker prevents BW reports from displaying

If you use Firefox to access BUworks, you may get an error message regarding your pop-up blocker when you attempt to run a BW report. The following short video outlines the steps you need to follow to allow reports to display while leaving your pop-up blocker active. Note that this is a one-time procedure.

View the video

Firefox displays reports in new windows instead of new tabs

Following the Business Warehouse upgrade, some Firefox users experienced the following behavior: clicking on the Reporting tab resulted in the generation of a new, fixed-width (narrow) window. Within BW, clicking to run reports generated additional narrow windows. This document  describes how to resolve this issue.