Welcome to the beginning of a conversation around Business Objects.  I've recently begun a pilot of XI 3.1 (after holding on to XI R2 for as long as possible).  I figured this might be a good starting point for talking about some of the pros and cons that we uncover during this testing and implementation.  I'll cover as many "nuggets" as I can across the various products that comprise XI 3.1 (Designer, WebI, DeskI, and many more) with some occasional diversions into general tips and tricks that have been useful at using Business Objects to solve particular business or technical challenges.

For reference, I have installed a single server XI 3.1 deployment onto a Windows 2003 server with SQLServer 2005.  I did a fresh install and did not go down the upgrade path.  The install was clean and easy and very similar to the XI R2 installation procedure.  The one improvement I did like was that you are now asked to provide a password for the Administrator account during the install process.  I did not test whether this would allow a blank password as I always want to make sure that account does have one!

I'm just now beginning to play around so I'll have more to post shortly.  The first thing that I immediately noticed is that we need to say goodbye to the blue boxes and pink balls of our dimension and measure objects.  These have been visually replaced:

The dimensions are substantially similar but the measures look more like a ruler (which I'm guessing is the visual look they were looking for).  I never thought I would wax nostalgic for the "pink ball" but I'm reminiscing on how many times I've trained on Business Objects and used the "pink ball" vs. "blue box" method of differentiaton.  I guess it's now "blue parallelogram" and "red/yellow ruler" scenario.  It just doesn't sound the same....