I really have a love/hate relationship with the new Information Design Tool (IDT). While I do enjoy the Eclipse-based interface, the multi-panel view of universes, folders, and repositories, and more, there are certainly still the "first-major-version" woes like those that my buddy Dallas points out over at his blog. But one topic that I actually still grapple with, is in how I organize my workspace, because this topic can impact not just me, but also my extended development team.

If you just thought that migrating groups is not a problem since I only have one instance, then shame on you, but that is a topic for another day. Assuming you do have separate CMS’s for Development, Test, and Production, in an idea world you would set up your security in your development instance, test to make sure it works and them migrate those setting through test and into production. Unfortunately using an external authentication group prevents you migrating your groups. This is because when migrating an object between SAP BusinessObjects instance the Cluster Unique Identifier (CUID) is used. When using external groups you cannot migrate them you have to import them into each instance. This causes the same group to have a different CUID in each instance. This means that as far as SAP BusinessObjects is concerned they are not the same group.

We have spent the last several months searching internally for ways we can help smooth the transition to SAP BusinessObjects BI4 for customers. We are really pretty fired up to share that the very first of those efforts is ready to unveil, Sherlock Quick Sizer, a totally-free-no-strings-attached utility from the team at EV Technologies.

It has been a few years since my good friends and I sat in my basement and began exploring the idea of building software to accompany SAP BusinessObjects. As I sit here reflecting on our journey, I am reminded of how fortunate we are for having opportunities, amazing colleagues, and customers that have turned out to be incredible champions for us. But the amazing thing to me is how I have learned over and over again that they can challenge us to continually innovate.

If you've been an administrator of Business Objects Enterprise for a while like we have, then there are a few big questions you regularly get asked and until now have had no good answers for.

What's going on inside of Business Objects when I run a report? Which step in the process is taking so long?

How do I know when something bad is lurking in there?