When upgrading Business Objects to the latest service pack, SP2, you need to have a lot of patience. At several customers we’ve performed an upgrade and if you wait long enough it will come around.

At our most recent upgrade the install started fine but while the installer was “Validating Install” we had time enough to get coffee, lunch, coffee, dinner, a good night sleep another coffee and so on..  a total no go.  After struggling with this I started to search the internet for similar stories.

I found some pretty interesting articles like: http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/XI3.1+SP2+Installation+on+Windows and http://neverknewthat.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/xi31sp2-slowinstall/. Both indicating that there is a silent install functionality.

Using the silent install the install was finished before my coffee was finished! However creating the .ini file can still be a pain because the cancel of the installation can take up a few minutes. Below a guideline:

(Assumption that the installer is already unzipped).
1. Create an empty response.ini file
Create a empty response.ini file on a location that’s easy to reach. You can use any name you like, but to keep it easy I used response. For this example I created it on the c:\ root.

2. Start the setup with the -w option
Open a command prompt and navigate to the install directory. Start the setup.exe with the -w option followed by the location of the response file.
E.g.: setup.exe -w c:\response.ini

3. Follow all the steps until the installation validation process starts.
Choose CANCEL here and abort the installation. The response.ini file will be updated with the options you selected during the setup.  (Please post your response.ini file below (without password), this way people reading this blog don’t need to do the -w part of the setup but can use your template)

4. Start the setup with the -r option
Open a command prompt and navigate to the install directory. Start the setup.exe with the -r option followed by the location of the response.ini file.
E.g.: setup.exe -r c:\response.ini

At this point the setup will start on the background, you don’t get any message if the setup is completed or executed successfully. Navigate to the Business Objects home directory (e.g. c:\program files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0) and open the Logging directory. There you find an install file that holds all the install information, one of the last lines will show either a success or failure.

As final check you can go to the Central Management Console and log in. Navigate to the Servers and select the CentralManagementServer. Go to Metrics and the product/resource version should show 12.2.*.

Hope it helps.. it sure did for me!

Richard