If you use Business Objects Web Intelligence on a Mac, you are aware that it is very difficult to find a browser that is compatible. In fact, SAP will basically tell you that the Mac is not a supported environment. However, I have found a combination that will work for you.
I have tested this on the following Mac environment:
- Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3
- Java Version 1.6.0_31-b04-415
There are 3 different clients available to use Web Intelligence. Only the Web and Java clients can be used on a Mac. The desktop client is a Windows only installation. I used the following web browsers to test Business Objects Web Intelligence on Mac OS X:
Of the above web browser, Firefox is the only browser that provides a decent user experience for Web Intelligence. The major issues with the other 2 browsers is that they don’t support drag and drop to move blocks, columns, and add new objects to existing blocks. Also they don’t support creating new documents in the java client and editing data providers. The java client is not great in Firefox, but it does allow you to create new documents, and edit data providers. All other functions that you need to do should be done in the regular web client.
The SAP Business Objects version used for this analysis was Version 4.0 Support Package 2 Patch 13.
In conclusion, if you are going to use SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence on Mac OS X, you should use Firefox as your web browser. I hope this has been helpful to you. If you have any questions or helpful advice to share others about your experience using Web Intelligence on Mac OS X, please leave a comment.
John Levandowski 
Hi,
I’m happy to know that it is supposed to work with FF 11. Do you know if it’s ok with FF12, or with Mac OS 10.6 ?
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I haven’t tested it yet with Firefox 12, but it seems to be ok with most of the recent Firefox releases. I don’t have Mac OS X 10.6 so I’m not sure if it will work or not. I suspect it will, but hopefully you or someone else can test and let everyone know.
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Hi, are you sure you have tested both java and web client? because for me the java client doesn’t work, only the web client, but there are some things that i need from the java client but nor safari neither firefox let me use that client, it throws me an error like i don’t have java installed but i do have java installed on the mac computer.
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The java client works in limited ways. If you can’t get the java client to load, just wait a minute or two, sometimes it takes a while to load and gives you a message that java is not installed. Alternatively, just click the refresh button in your browser, sometimes that works to give the java client a little nudge.
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Hi…
I would like to know if there is any installable for downloading Business Objects in Mac. What is the best way to practice BO in Mac ?
Thanks
Gayathri
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There is no heavy client for Mac OS X. If you need a heavy client, you could try installing a virtual version of Windows on your Mac with a tool like VirtualBox.
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Thank you !!!!
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Hi John,
(1) If Windows 7 Professional is used to boot (in a partition on Mac), will BO BI work as perfect as on an original Windows environment
(2) Is Windows 7 Professional necessary or the unprofessional version of Windows will also work.
(3) I assume that there will be no hardware conflict once Windows 7 is run on Mac Partition for BO BI
Best regards
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