Installing SAP Business Objects XIR 3.0 on Server-Client Architecture

This post discusses the steps to install BO XIR 3.0 on a VMware server and connect to it from your laptop machine.
Note: I have used MS SQL Server 2008 as by back end database server for CMS and Audit databases.

VMWare Installation:
Install VMWare and use Bridged setting rather than NAT, you should be able to ping "from and to" the new virtual machine individually.

On the VMWare Server:
1- Create a user in SQL Server 2008 with read and write access to the database server.
2- Create CMS and AUDIT databases
3- Create ODBC connections for both CMS and Audit databases.
4- Install BO with the Web Application Server (by default Apache TomCat)

After the installation is complete make sure BO is working fiine.

On the Client Side (laptop machine):
1- Install client tools for Business Objects (by default, during the setup BO will ask you to install the client tools only)
2- Specify the CMS name (system name of your VMware server) to the client tools and connect to the server BO instance.
Eg. for Infoview to access the BO server, type http://CMSname:8080/InfoViewApp.
To access CMC, type http://CMSname:8080/CmcApp

3- So now for example you create a universe on the server side, and you also create are report on that and want the client machine to view the report. The server can export the report and the client will be able to see the report in Infoview. However, if the client machine wants to refresh or edit the report, there will be an error message displayed. This is becuase the client machine has no connection with the database.

So remember on the server machine you created an ODBC connection with the databases, that same ODBC connection needs to be created on the client machine as well, the name of the ODBC should remain the same.