As one of the titans of business intelligence (BI) platforms, Business Objects has been slowly but surely acquiring technology and integrating it into their existing foundation. A careful reading between the lines of the marketing for their newest release, Business Objects XI Release 2 (R2), will lead an experienced IT hand to think it's primarily an integration release, with the focus on smoother connections be As one of the titans of business intelligence (BI) platforms, Business Objects has been slowly but surely acquiring technology and integrating it into their existing foundation. A careful reading between the lines of the marketing for their newest release, Business Objects XI Release 2 (R2), will lead an experienced IT hand to think it’s primarily an integration release, with the focus on smoother connections between the working parts. That might be true, but it would undervalue what Business Objects accomplished with this upgrade. The key values souped-up in XI R2 involve simpler self-service querying and the ability for low- to intermediate-level users to easily set up dashboards and portals to give bird’s-eye views of current dynamic and stored data. Crystal Xcelsius is the powerhouse behind most of that ability, though not all of it. A feature set that Business Objects calls “Intelligent Question” gives rank newbies a natural-language interface to deliver queries the system will try to answer. A new Encyclopedia documents accessible data sources and deliverables, and searchers can use English-language queries to find items.Individuals have (and can share) their own “InfoView” dashboard. The act of building dashboards through the Dashboard Manager appears very straightforward, with a graphically-clear design environment. The deliverables UI supports clean drill-down capabilities.My sole dispute with Business Objects’ design is the use of the word “analytic” to define a delivered graphic — a muddying of the term for marketing purposes. Otherwise, I’m very impressed with what they’ve achieved in the release. The sales engineer who demonstrated the platform allowed me to take him far off the script, but everything we walked through was clearly thought-out and looked highly implementable, customizable and maintainable. The entire BI space underwent a revolution in the last two years in terms of its strength at making the creation of BI deliverables something IT can delegate to business analysts — or even some of the more-capable executives — who consume the information. Business Objects XI R2 exemplifies how cleverly it can be delivered. BusinessObjects XI R2 Platforms: AIX 5.2, Red Hat 4.0 Advanced or Enterprise Server for x86, HP-UX 11.11, Windows 2000 SP4 Professional and above Price: Roughly $750 per user for typical installations Verdict: BusinessObjects XI R2 is a more significant release than it appears at first glance. The most striking and IT-resource saving enhancements in this release help advance self-service intelligence work for users in the totally raw and low-intermediate skill ranges. Technology Industry