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Connect to SAP BW with SSO

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Philip Botterill on 11 May 2018 17:06:28

Connect to SAP BW with single-sign-on via on-premise gateway

Large SAP BW installations with thousands of users are often accessed via single-sign-on (SSO) e.g. the users windows credentials are used to authenticate to BW. SSO simplifies the user experience and reduces user administration costs. These users should be able to setup on-premise gateway connections that can be used to refresh data sets in the Power BI Service. The connections should leverage that individuals BW roles & authorizations and not require a BW password i.e. automatically associate the Power BI user ID to the associated SAP user ID.

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:00:15

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

As Power BI competes with the SAP Self Service Solution Lumira, which offers full BW Support, connectivity should be a top priority.

Many Small/Mid Companies use BW without BO and SAP is pushing Lumira intensively.

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David Velazquez on 05 Jul 2020 22:00:09

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

SAP BW will be a huge success!

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 21:59:58

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

SAP BW

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Juha Tuominen on 05 Jul 2020 21:59:18

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

Connector for SAP BW would be nice.

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Hemanth on 05 Jul 2020 21:59:15

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

SAP BW and SAP ECC/R3 is a must

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Brent on 05 Jul 2020 21:58:58

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

SAP HANA would be a great source...

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Thomas K on 05 Jul 2020 21:58:44

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

In my mind the SAP Netweaver Gateway would be a good choice for all. The Gateway should be available for everyone with a Business contract automatically. On the other hand the GW is the promoted Connectivity method of the future in order to connect to non SAP Systems. All BAPI and RFC related Objects in ERP, BW and other Netweaver based products will be available via ODATA. So OATA in combination with Netweaver Gateway would be my choice.

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Martin O'Connell on 05 Jul 2020 21:57:24

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

Connectivity to SAP BW could be a game changer for Power BI. SAP tools for querying the data are not very user friendly. If Excel and/or Power BI Designer had SAP BW as a data connector (not the BO Universe connector), this would make life so much easier for end-users who would no longer have to wait on their IT department to do everything for them. Tableau has it, Power BI needs it!

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Travis Clayton on 05 Jul 2020 21:56:59

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

ERP connectivity then BW then HANA. All of my customers run SAP, this would really help drive adoption of PowerBI for our enterprise customers.

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Andre Fomin on 05 Jul 2020 21:56:56

RE: Connect to SAP BW with SSO

I made a suggestion yesterday for "What should be build next" but it does not seem to work today, Anyway, I am happy to retype it for a good cause.

40% of US EPG customers run SAP and over 50% of US EPG customers are SAP customers. A typical SAP customer will have a very mature BW implementation that is used company wide for reporting (BW stands for Business Warehouse). Hundreds of thousands if not millions of users are using the SAP technology called BEX to extract data from BW into excel and then use HLOOKUPS, VLOOKUPS and SUMIFs to build reports in Excel / PowerPoint. There is never a sales cycle with and SAP customer where this does not come up and today we have no answer for BW connectivity. This is hugely important.

ability to connect directly to SAP is somewhat interesting too, however, it is a level of magnitude less common.

Currently, it is uncommon for IT departments to enable self service access for end users to HANA, therefore I think this is the least important. It's a nice have, but since Hana is a direct compete with SQL Server, I would prioritize it last.

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