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Service Pack 2 for SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise was recently released, and included some great new features like Web Intelligence Input Controls – see Coy Yonce’s blog post here (needs an SAP login).

However, my frustrations lie in that no SP2 for Edge XI 3.1 was announced.  Remembering back several years, service packs for BOE could be applied to Edge and even Crystal Reports Server, as they were all compatible.

However, it seems that the codebase has started to diverge, or the teams responsible for service packs aren’t coordinated across the different platform offerings.

As a consultant who deploys Edge frequently, this is frustrating considering that there are no discernible differences when using BO Edge compared to BO Enterprise.  Having no programming background at all, I may be swinging wild here, but it seems to me that using license keys to switch features on and off (like clustering, or Federation) would be simpler than diverging what is essentially the same codebase and maintaining separate service pack and fix packs.

I’m not across the success of SAP BusinessObjects Edge in the greater world community, however in Australia it is becoming a very successful platform, and I often need to tell our clients that they have to wait another (estimated) 6 months for a service pack, when the features they require are already available to Enterprise users.

Does anyone else see a need for coordinated delivery of service packs for the BI platform?  Or perhaps someone from SAP can weigh in on why they are delivered separately?

If there are good reasons, I’d love to hear them as most of the annoyance comes from the lack of communication.

– Josh