SAP News

SAP News & Review » It’s All About Upgrades at the Annual SAP NetWeaver Conference: "The consensus is that the ERP 2005 upgrade is relatively painless when it comes to the current installations of SAP Business Warehouse, most of which are on version 3.5 or 3.0. You certainly have to go through numerous rounds of formal integration testing, validating that the data coming into the warehouse is still accurate and complete. However, you are more likely to struggle with syncing and re-loading your ERP and BW test systems than locating actual problems that were caused by the ERP 2005 upgrade.
The upgrade of the data warehouse itself to SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence 7.0 is a whole other ballgame, with quite a bit of changes in the front and back-end environments. Why upgrade? Most of the companies are doing it because of the new front-end functionality, such as Integrated Planning, Report Designer and updated Business Explorer for OLAP navigation, or due to the fact that BW 3.5 is running out of support in the near future. Although BI 7.0 does bring a whole new data flow concept on the back-end called Data Transfer Process, SAP has provided the option of completing a technical-only upgrade and then slowly migrating your existing models to the new DTP design. "