1942923 - How to publish WebI reports from AIX to SharePoint

http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform/blog/2013/02/12/publishing-businessobjects-reports-to-sharepoint

I've searched for documentation and it doesn't look like there's any parallel documentation for *nix OS. That said, I've reviewed the Windows documentation and it doesn't look like the process would be significantly different. There are a couple of key points which I'll detail below.

First, please note as stated in the article that this process is not considered to be Sharepoint integration. This process is the publishing of documents to a shared folder which SharePoint reads. Effectively what needs to happen, from the BI perspective, is simply a scheduled output to disk location. I've reviewed the blog post and made comments below on the numbered steps to focus on the differences between operating systems. Please read the steps below in conjunction with the blog.

*** Important Note *** I have not performed these steps or downloaded/installed the packages myself; this is what I believe to be possible based on research alone. This process and any installed packages must be tested in development.

1. Identify the Sharepoint directory's UNC path. (This is not OS-specific.)

2. Mount the Sharepoint directory as a network drive on AIX for that user. (More detailed info on this in #4.)

3. Ensure the AIX user account under which the BI services run has read/write permissions to the directory in #2.

4. The Web Client service discussed here is for Windows systems only, and it's for using the webdav protocol, which is what enables the read/write of internet-based files. More information about this from the Windows perspective can be found here: http://www.windowstipspage.com/what-is-webclient-service/

AIX is not limited to one service or package to enable connections with webdav shares, so you would have to research what is available and decide what is best for your specific AIX/BI/SharePoint implementation. You may already have a webdav package installed on your AIX server. Some information on one way to mount WEBDAV shares on Linux can be found here: http://howto.unixdev.net/Linux-SharePoint.html

Please note that issues establishing connections between *nix OS and webdav shares are outside the scope of BI support as these issues would apply to all file types, not just BI objects such as WebI reports. I would really strongly recommend testing the upload of a simple text file from AIX to the SharePoint directory to ensure that part is working before moving on to scheduling reports, as BI adds a layer of complexity to the troubleshooting.

5. Schedule the report to the mount location set up in steps 2-4. (Not OS-specific, as this is being done in BI LaunchPad. However, the path could be OS-specific.)

6. Look in SharePoint to confirm the report was successfully published. (Not OS-specific.)

KBA , BI-RA-WBI , Web Intelligence , Problem