Future funcionalities in SAP BI

Are you interesting what are next hot functionalities which will be included in SAP BI? Is your most wished feature contained? Are you aware of some enhancement what could make BW life easier and you cannot wait when it will be implemented as a standard functionality? For all those kind of questions SAP is providing a document called Functional Enhancements Schedule BI. Currently it does cover version of SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 (2004s). Document is available via SDN here and via OSS here. The newest version is no. 15.3 as of April 29, 2008. For updates always check out folder BI Capabilities NW 7.0 of OSS. It does includes all enhancements added to NW BI 7.0 until Enhancement Package (EHP) no. 1; since EHP1 enhancements will be announced via standard future EHP roll-outs.

History of enhancements already delivered (new functionalitities shipped with older SP stacks) is structured according following sections:

1.      Enterprise Query, Reporting

2.      Business Planning

3.      Enterprise Data Warehousing

New enhancements are structured according following sections:

1.      AdHoc Query & Analysis

2.      Query, Reporting & Analysis Design

3.      Modeling the EDW

Other possible sources of SAP BI news are:

1.      OSS notes:

a.      853507 - Release Restr.: Usage Type BI of SAP NetWeaver 2004s

b.      853505 - Release Restr.: Usage Type BI-Java of SAP NetWeaver 2004s

c.      1055581 - Recommendations for Support Package Stacks for BI 7.0

d.      1013369 - SAP NetWeaver 7.0 BI - intermediate Support Packages

2.      OSS BI news page (+Business Information Warehouse News Page Archive)

3.      OSS BI FAQs:

a.      Business Explorer Suite: Platform Questions

b.      Report Design

c.      Web Application Design

d.      Business Explorer Web Printing & Export

4.      SDN BI

5.      SDN BI forums:

a.      BI General

b.      Business Content and Extractors

c.      Data Warehousing

d.      BI Suite - Business Explorer

e.      BI Business Planning

f.       BI in SAP NetWeaver 2004s

g.      SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator

-                     update 20/08/2008 –

“Enhancement package (EHP) 1 for SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 - Functional Enhancements Schedule” has been released on 18th of August. BI part of it is integrated in Enhancement package for SAP NetWeaver. Major changes included in this EHP is regarding Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) and in
"Enterprise Reporting, Query, and Analysis" furthermore in Business Object (BOBJ) integration to SAP BI and "SAP Business Planning and Consolidation". For more details at SDN here.

-                     update 22/11/2008 –

After “EHP - Functional Enhancements Schedule” from August 2008 during November 2008 an Enhancement package 1 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0 has been released. It does include additional modeling capabilities in area of Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) which provide better data consistency, enhanced administration features and improved mass data handling. In the area of Enterprise Reporting, Query, and Analysis additional flexibility for Information Broadcasting, Formatted Reporting and BEx Analyzer is supported. For more details at SDN here.