Universe and UNX Visual Diff & Version History – here first!

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: The ability to visually compare two classic Universe or more modern, UNX (Semantic Layer) between any environment or version of SAP BusinessObjects.

So what? Well…

The scenario is all too familiar to us:

Manager: These numbers don’t look right
Report Developer: But nothing changed, all we did was refresh the report
Manager: I understand, but revenue for the last period was higher before, now its dipped
Report Developer: Hmmm, we’ll take a look

(hours pass)
Report Developer: It looks like someone modified the Universe file and published it before getting approval somehow
Manager: This is unacceptable; can we at least identify the change that’s causing the numbers to be incorrect? We’re in compliance violation and if we cannot audit this occurrence we’ll be fined
Report Developer: We’ll have to go through every piece of the universe; the original developer has left the company

(days pass)

And so on and so forth. With Visual Diff, we slice through hours, if not days, of error-prone root cause analysis trying to manually assess changes across complex objects.