What is the "CMS"?
You may have noticed the (not-so-subtle) hints sprinkled throughout the site about CMS/Connect. That's because we're quite excited to release what we think is one of the most innovative - and most productive technologies for SAP Business Objects to have come about in quite some time. Yes, we're talking about CMS/Connect - the only native, real-time query and reporting solution for the Business Objects Enteprise CMS.
What is the Central Management Server (CMS), anyway?
The Central Management Server is the metadata backbone of an SAP Business Objects Enterprise installation. The metadata is stored in two physically distinct areas:
- a physical RDBMS
- a file folder location on disk.
...containing information like Users, Groups, WebIntelligence Document and Universes among other things. The following diagram pictorializes this.
A number of the APIs for SAP Business Objects (RAS, REBEAN, Designer COM, Enterprise, BIP) rely on being able to communicate with the CMS via public and private APIs. In addition to the APIs, a web-based utility - the "Query Builder" - exists as part of any Business Objects XIr2 or XI3 installation and provides the end-user with a SQL-like grammar to extract information ("Show me all reports that start with 'Sales'") from this environment
For example, if you open an ".exe" file on your harddrive using a text editor (on Windows, of course), then you’d probably end up reading lots of nonsensical gibberish ASCII characters - meaningless to a person but filled with binary data that's useful to a computer.
In similar fashion, the CMS acts like the ".exe" file and keeps information "sealed" in unreadable form, until it's translated by a program:
By now you probably get the idea. But don’t take my word for it! You can read about it in much greater detail here:
And what about CMS/Connect - how does that fit into all this?
CMS/Connect is the very technology developed by Infolytik that allows us to translate, in real-time, information stored in these physical locations, to a coherent language-based report, allowing one to answer questions such as:
- How many users are in my CMS?
- How many of my users who have logged on actually author or own reports? Schedule reports?
- Where are my Universes located? In what folders? What connections do they utilize?
- What objects exist in my universes?
- What security role has been assigned to the Report Authors group? Do descendents of this group inherit any rights?
...and so on and so forth. Having said that, there are many, many applications for being able to report this type of information while leveraging existing SAP Business Objects technology - specifically what those applications are is what we’ll delve into in much greater detail in future posts. Stay tuned... !