For various reasons you might require your users to use a specific version of Analysis for Office on their clients. You might use specific features in the workbooks which require a new version, there is a known bug in the old version, or you simply would like to avoid supporting multiple versions of the tool at the same time and are tired of asking your users to send screenshots in their support tickets.
Applications on your organizations hundreds of laptops around the world are usually installed and updated via some software configuration management tool like ‘Configuration Manager’ or ‘Software Center’, but let’s be honest, we know these update procedures are of distributed nature, can be deloyed and are prone to fail. So what can you as a BW administrator or developer do to make sure your users do have the AfO version you want them to have?
Unfortunately there is no out of the box solution for this, but with a few lines of ABAP code write your own. If you put an enhancement implementation at the end of function module RSAO_BICS_SESSION_INITIALIZE you can retrieve the AfO and Office versions and prohibit the user from starting a new backend connection by issueing an error message.
DATA lv_office TYPE string.
DATA lv_ao TYPE string.
DATA lv_subrc TYPE sysubrc.
CALL FUNCTION 'RSAO_GET_FRONTEND_PROPERTY'
EXPORTING
i_name = 'AO_FRONTEND_OFFICE_VERSION'
IMPORTING
e_value = lv_office_version
e_subrc = lv_subrc.
CALL FUNCTION 'RSAO_GET_FRONTEND_PROPERTY'
EXPORTING
i_name = 'AO_FRONTEND_VERSION_FULL'
IMPORTING
e_value = lv_ao_version
e_subrc = lv_subrc.
"TODO: implement decision logic if version is recent enought
"TODO: issue warning or error message if the version is too old or is about to expire
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