SAP BusinessObject BI platform 4.2 is a reporting and analytics platform that targets business users. It is an innovation platform that simplifies, enhances, and extends the capabilities of BI. It consists of a number of reporting applications with which a user can discover data, create applications and dashboards, and perform analytics to derive business insights. The platform ensures increased responsiveness, reduced costs and workload, and helps organizations to make better decisions.

We need to understand the various tools available in SAP BusinessObject 4.2 to perform reporting. There are multiple management tools, platform services, and client tools in SAP BusinessObjects 4.2 that support the entire range of user reporting, queries, analysis, and performance management.

Some of the salient features of the SAP BI platform are as follows:

• BI content management allows the secure storage of BI content
• It provides a software development kit, which can be used by the API to extend the solution or for making the process automated
• It is possible to distribute personalized BI content to a large audience in an automated manner
• It gives the ability to scale up and scale out to suit growing demand
• It provides services to the audit trail for compliance or capacity planning

The following diagram shows the overview of the architecture of SAP BusinessObjects BI:

The following are some of the main BusinessObjects BI platforms:

• Central Management Console (CMC)
• Server Intelligence Agent (SIA)
• Central Configuration Manager (CCM)
• Central Management Servers (CMS)
• Semantic layer tool
• Client tools

In the next section, let's examine in detail the following platform tools for administration:

• CMC
• CCM
• Lifecycle Management (LCM) tools