The Good, Bad And The Ugly Of Sap Lumira Discovery

Before I start into this BLOG, I am a BIG FAN of SAP BI products. I have been using and implementing SAP BI products from last 10 years. If you are thinking I am going to praise Lumira or SAP then you are wrong. Don’t read this story if you are expecting some good things about Lumira Discovery.

This is story is my one year journey with the tool and implementation.

The Good

• When SAP announced Lumira Discovery the Self-Service Visualization analytics tool we were so excited. Attended many demos conferences and excited about the product  that is In memory. Tool which is going to give tough competition to other products out in the market
• We are early adopters of Lumira Discovery. While doing the POCs and some implementations (1.2x) features that are available are good and SAP roadmap looks promising with upcoming features.
• Lumira Discovery supports UNV, UNX,BICS, FHSQL, Excel, CSV. You can connect to almost all kinds of Databases

The Bad

• As SAP releasing new versions of Lumira Discovery 1.2x > 1.3x > 2.x . Basic features that existed in older versions have started disappearing
  • Time hierarchy that used to support with custom formatting no longer exist
  • Sorting of Cross tab data no longer support with Universe and offline connections
  • Export to excel from cross tab no longer exist
• Following basic functionalities are missing
  • Date formatting in time hierarchy is not possible
  • Export to excel from cross tabs is not possible unless you have “Design” access
  • Cannot have Date input controls with sliders
  • Very limited formulas available (Not even 30% of Webi)
  • Cannot create Lumira document from BI Launchpad using universe or offline connection. You must have Discovery tool
  • Bookmarks promotions barely works
  • No wordwrap option for cross tab headers
  • Cannot hide a column in cross tab
  • No option to Copy cross tab data to excel
• Some SAP KB articles on the issues we have
  • 2647607 – Cannot convert a Month number to a Month name in Lumira
  • 2647616 – Unable to sort on Month name in Lumira Discovery
  • 2647421 – Unable to copy data from a Lumira Dashboard in BI Launchpad
  • 2647600 – Unable to hide a column in a crosstab in Lumira Discovery

The Ugly

• One fine day SAP product team woke up and announced they are going to end the Lumira Discovery product. Major features and enhancements will not be released. Critical bug fixes will be released.
• We have raised couple of tickets on the issues and features we got same reply from SAP support is – “This is considered an enhancement request, and development is not currently looking at any more enhancement requests for Lumira.”