Since I know many are still unsure what the differences are between the different BusinessObjects tools, I and my employees at ComeritLabs have built a series of blogs and movies to demo each of the tools. I start with BI 4.0 Explorer.
Background
BI 4.0 explorer are basically an idea that you can upload pre-defined information spaces to memory and search the data with "Google-like" speed in an unstructured way. There is no queries and minimal development work.
The tool can be deployed many ways. You can store your data in-memory using BW Accelerator or HANA, or you can simply keep it ‘un-accelerated” and access it from a database. However, the latter option may be rather slow and therefore remove much of the benefits of BI Explorer: speed.
BI 4.0 Explorer Demo
Tool Summary
To keep things in perspective, below is a summary chart to see what each tool is intended for, who should be doing the development and the core capabilities. This is by nature subjective, but should provide some basic comparison of the tools.
To see more BI 4.0 Explorer demos and details, visit my presentation at BIIT 2012 conference i n Las Vegas called “A technical guide to implementing and optimizing SAP BusinessObjects Explorer”. It will be on Tuesday, February 28, 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm in room 320.
In the next blog I will demo the dashboarding tool Xcelsius
Dr. Berg