Microsoft Reporting Services and SAP BI

Stephan Stoltze from Microsoft has an interesting Microsoft perspective on the options available to access SAP BI data using Microsoft products - Microsoft Business Intelligence on SAP Netweaver Data.

The default scenario for SAP BI users is to utilise SAP products like Bex Analyser and Enterprise Portal to administer BI and query data. However, Microsoft also provide some very powerful analysis and reporting tools. As Excel 2007 becomes more adept at handling OLAP data (and has features to publish it to a SharePoint portal), the case for a multi-vendor BI solution is more apparent.

The three proposed scenarios using Microsoft products are:

1. Embrace BW



Use reporting as a client tool for SAP BW. Microsoft .NetProvider for SAP NetWeaverBusiness Intelligence to expose the data using an XML/A interface to BW. This option has the least issues, providing a comprehensive solution with SAP security. See the presentation for tips and tricks.

2. Extract raw SAP BW data

Purchase SAP Open Hub Service (OHS) and extract the data into a Microsoft data mart for reporting. This is meant to perform better, but requires purchase of an OHS license from SAP. I would also think there is considerably more effort to implement it, as you are effectively building and integrating two distinct BI solutions.

3. Extract raw ERP data - no SAP BW

Here the data is extracted directly from tables in the SAP transactional system into the Microsoft data mart. There are few advantages to this option. It is not supported by SAP, you have no SAP security and you lose out on all the predelivered SAP business content and it breaks the cardinal rule about not accessing SAP tables direclty.

If you need Microsoft's analysis tools, most scenarios would support option 1 as the clear choice.