Business demands ERP applications to be aligned to their operations and fulfill their ever changing business requirements. To accomplish these changes, ongoing development generates the need of smooth maintenance of business contents across ERP systems. These operations must be well established to distribute changed contents across systems in a landscape.
SAP has streamlined ERP operations of ABAP content transports via CTS (Change and Transport System) and non-SAP transport via enhanced CTS which is known as CTS+. Similarly SAP Business Objects BI platform demands, How to manage contents, repositories, security and maintain versions in SAP BO 4.0 platform?
SAP Business Objects 4.0 offers LifeCycle Management (LCM) console to manage Product Life Cycle information from origin of Concept through Delivery. LifeCycle Management (LCM) is an add-on to SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence 4.0 Platform and is a web based application which allows you to govern product life cycle, move BI resources between repositories of different systems, maintain versions, security, audit and rollback contents if required, working at same or different geographical locations.
SAP BO 4.0 Landscape – LCM Architecture
LifeCycle Management Console Features
Promotion is a feature which allows moving BI contents to destination system repositories.
Like classical SAP way, you can create a Job (similar to transport request), copy or edit an existing job which will contain all contents to be promoted to destination system.
You can test promote feature to ensure that there are no errors in transport.
Dependency Management feature allows selecting, filtering required contents and their dependent objects which are required for smooth functioning of objects in destination system.
Security is another prominent feature which allows user to enforce security rights or restrictions to transported objects in destination system.
It provides options to
- Promote objects with security
- Promote objects without security
Objects transported with security contain security definitions defined in original system and objects transported without security, inherits security definitions of destination system.
Administration Options allows administrator to set parameter for LCM like Manage Systems, Rollback settings, Job Settings, Version Management Settings and Override settings. These are explained as follows.
Promoting Overrides allows user to override Object properties like Data Source Connections, CR connections, Qwaas. It overrides properties those are imported from source system.
Scheduling allows administrator to transport contents at defined job promotion time instead of transporting immediately.
Rollback allows user to revert contents to previous state. It can be full or partial rollback. LCM console allows you to select objects which are required to rollback. Contents can be rollback to 1 level of previous version only.
Auditing feature enables you to monitor the events that are logged in the audit database.
Version Management allows maintaining versions of document and track changes on it.
Note:
- Import/Export wizard is no longer used for BO 4.0 content transport/deployment. It is only meant for upgrade to BO 4.0 from previous release.
- Same version of SAP BO BI platform application is required to be installed on source and destination system to transport contents via LCM.
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Mandeep Virk 