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:

Firefox 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.