Business Objects Content Management planning

Hi BOOglers,

Let us resume with Administration track once again with Content management planning in Business Objects. Hope this is going to be more interesting and helpful for the Administrators to start up with.

Content management plan is a collection of procedures used to manage Business objects work flow in a collaborative and manageable environment. This ensures who needs access to what. While planning for Business Objects enterprise system appropriate content management planning is an important factor. Because of lack of expertise and time we always end up with BOE environment which is not structured properly, as a result BOE environment will become more difficult to manage and maintain.

Below are simple measures to consider in order plan for our BI content.

• Easy to understand the hierarchy and secure implementation
• Ensure users only accessing documents which they interested and authorized to.
• Efficient structure so users are able to search the info they need easily
• Easy access to information in the system will increase effectiveness of using the system.

Points to be consider for the Content management Planning

1. Creating a folder structure and organizing objects

As a first and foremost step we need to segregate the BI content according to users who is going to consume the information. This will enable us to decide the folder hierarchy of the system.

For example, for set of reports to Marketing department, we will manage them in the Marketing parent folder. Then we have a subfolder called Marketing- Americas or Marketing-Asia Pacific where reports can further be separated.

2. Organize users by creating a Group/User structure

Now we need to organize user group structure that will allow access to BI content. This will be similar to the folder structure, in our example we will be having a Marketing group each further categorized basd on the region.

3. Set access levels for folders and objects

Next we need to establish the security access levels for folders and objects contained in our group/user structure. This is extremely critical as we may risk in setting inappropriate security access levels for our users. Determining the needs of our users will help us establish who needs access to what folders and objects within the system. For example only users of the Marketinggroup can access the Marketing folder based on their functional roles.

Custom access levels created for each functional user group is depicted as below.

And finally this is how security is applied on Folder at Group level.

4. Creating corporate categories and assigning objects

The advantage of categories is that it will help the uses to search and access the reports that are appropriate to them. This can be configured according to uses requirement.

For example, the Marketing department user search for reports that are specific to vendor evaluation,

Even if the vendor related reports managed across different folders, we can create a separate category called Vendor management and group the corresponding reports in the Vendor management category. As a result the user not necessarily needs to go to every folder and search for the required report. They can simply access the category with which they authorized to access with.

In the below screen though the reports Marketing Dashboard and Sales Dashboard physically exist in Marketing and Sales folders respectively, still they can be accessed from Vendor  Management category.

The above are the initial steps that we can take to create a planned content management system with which we can end up with success.

I look forward to your inputs and feedback. Thanks for reading!

Read More  Business Objects Administration