SAP Business Objects Vs Old Business Objects`

A Very Good Morning,
I am a old religious follower of Business Objects starting from 6x where it suppose to be a typical reporting tool, pretty much comparable to OLAP reporting tools like Cognos, microstrategy. Reports were pretty much created in Desktop Intelligence, saved in local machine and then using version controlled to infoview. Pretty much developer used to create the reports as they used to be complex. Following Datawarehousing concept in every step used to be daily routine. Talking about agile methodology and Ralph Kimball used to make us smile.
Business Objects in its native form is an extremely powerful tool, as it allows developers with a good knowledge in databases SQL to create amazingly difficult reports with ease,and surprise the business users a lot. The thin layer of difference between a report created by a developer and a business user was intact. The layer was good for us as we are the developers and that is our bread and butter. And also the continous interaction between business user and the IT personal is very important for a company as it allows a free flow of knowledge between these two groups. This also allows the sequential growth of the company data and data management.
Coming back to Business Objects, it allows a single platform to create complex reports combining data from disparate systems or putting differnt kind of business rules within the report layer and providing a flexibility to provide data for different audiences using the same data mart, whereas it also allows a business user to create adhoc reports it satisfy their smaller need.
Then came the era of designing different kind of tools , acquisition of business objects by SAP and the overall idea of datawarehousing was clouded by the SAP and its fancy tools. like SAP BW , SAP XI. These tools are good within their own terms, pretty power ful and flexible. However given the case , they are also away from the concept of CWM. Very much intact within SAP and also strictly following the SAP rules is making these tools very difficult to accept atleast for developers like me. Every time one is working with SAP he will face the problem," SAP doesnt allow external tools to access its data directly, it has to go via a either integration kits or you just cant do it"
Currently i am working with SAP BW and as i am mentioned i am a BO follower so still engaged with Business Objects. During the next set of our jouney towards BO to SAP i would like to elaborate the transition of methodology, the momentary stepping away from the concept of data warehousing and how you can still hold on to the new concept as well as walking along side the CWM/Datawarehousing.
Also the major reason to start this blog is to give a open platform for the old BO developers to learn the integration with SAP BW/R3 and what possible problem one face while doing it for the first time. Also i felt the information is kept like a secret, away from all the BO guys who are not member of so called "SAP group". Initally i felt it very hard to learn a lot of things about the new BO as it is not placed in a proper way in sdn.sap.com site, also coded in the SAP terminology.I would like to break the jinx.

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