Web Intelligence Rich Client lets you work in three different modes:
1. Connected Mode:
In this mode you can work with objects(reports,universes) that are stored in the Central Management Server(CMS) as well as the objects that are stored locally. You can import/export documents from/to the CMS, create new or modify existing reports as long as you have the required rights assigned in Central Management Console(CMC).
There are two ways to launch Web Intelligence Rich Client in connected mode:
2. Offline Mode:
Before you work in this mode, you should have connected to the CMS atleast once in connected mode. In this mode you can work with objects(reports, universes) that are stored locally but since you are not connected to CMS, you can’t import/export documents from/to the CMS. You can also work with objects(reports,universes) that are secured by CMS as long as you have the required rights assigned in Central Management Console(CMC). Your security information will be downloaded to the computer in a local security information(LSI) file when you first connect to the CMS in connected mode, that is the reason you are required to connect to the CMS atleast once before using offline mode.
You can launch Web Intelligence Rich Client in offline mode through windows start menu or by opening a Web Intelligence document on your local machine, be sure to select Offline mode option as shown in the figure below.
3. Standalone Mode:
In standalone mode, you can work with objects(reports, universes) that are stored locally but you can’t work with objects(reports,universes) secured by CMS even when those objects are stored locally on your computer. Moreover, since you are not connected to CMS, you can’t import/export documents from/to the CMS.
You can launch Web Intelligence Rich Client in standalone mode through windows start menu or by opening a Web Intelligence document on your local machine, be sure to select standalone mode in the authentication list.
Many Business Objects administrators/developers might have stymied by their managers when trying to install Security Viewer on production. Managers are sometimes overcautious and panic when it comes to doing anything on a production system.
An ex-college of mine ran into a similar situation. They were upgrading from Business Objects XI R2 to Business Objects XI 3.1, so they wanted to document their XI R2 security. As you might have guessed, the best tool to document security in XI R2 is Security Viewer. But they were not allowed to install anything on their production system. He asked me if there is any other way around it. I said yes, install Security Viewer on a development or test server and when you launch it, specify your production CMS information ;). In fact, I would never install it on a production server if I have a development or test server. So the tip here is that you can install Security Viewer on one server and connect to other servers as long as they are on the same domain.
Many of you might have experienced the painful “time out” in Web Intelligence when working with reports where the Web Intelligence session times out and you potentially end up loosing your development work. But not anymore….
Starting from XI 3.1, Web Intelligence automatically saves your documents at intervals defined in Central Management Console(CMC). The documents are saved under My Favorites/~Web Intelligence folder. You configure the auto save option in the Web Intelligence application properties(CMC->Applications->Web Intelligence->Properties) in Central ManagementConsole(CMC) as shown below.
Lets go through the configuration settings:
Max size of auto-saved data: This represents the maximum size limit of the reports in the My Favorites/~Web Intelligence folder. If the size exceeds this limit, Web Intelligence will delete some of the old documents to make room for new reports.
Auto-save time delay: This dictates how often Web Intelligence saves the report automatically. For example, if you set this to 60, Web Intelligence will keep saving the document every one minute. Please note that this interval resets each time you save a document manually or each time when Web Intelligence saves a document automatically.
Clean up time delay: This setting dictates how often Web Intelligence deletes all the reports in the My Favorites/~Web Intelligence folder.
If you happen to be working on a report and the Web Intelligence server times out, a Document Autosave and Recovery dialog box pops up indicating that the report has been auto-saved in the Favorites/~Web Intelligence folder as shown in the figure below.
If you click restore , Web Intelligence will launch a new session and will open the auto-saved document which you can then save in the original folder. You can also access the report in the Favorites/~Web Intelligence folder. Web Intelligence will save the report with same name but it attaches some internal ids before and after the name of the report as shown in the figure below.
Another interesting thing about this feature is that it will auto-save the document in the event of a session time out even though the autosave time configured in CMC is not elapsed.
There are certain things that you need to be aware of while using this feature:
This blog post has been moved to http://shahfaisalmuhammed.blogspot.com/2011/09/disaster-recovery-in-sap-business.html
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