Differences between BO XI R2 and BO XI 3.0

1)WebI has a desktop version now.
Now you will be able to save your webI reports on desktop as a client tool has been introduced for the creation of WebI Reports. No more issues of global license. You just need a WebI license to create a WebI Report

2)The major improvement of XI 3.0 over XI R2 is architecture/administration-related:
- The user-interface of the Central Management Console (CMC) has improved: it mimics the Windows Explorer interface with its directory trees and pull-down menus;
- The new 'Security Query' in CMC enables administrators to search for specific objects;
- Auditing services comes now standard with CMC - No additional licence-costs are required anymore;
- Report-scheduling comes now standard with CMC. Also schedule options for WebIntelligence, Business Objects & Crystal Reports have improved so it matches BO6's BroadCastAgent Publisher;
- The new 'Federation'-option enables you to replicate servers on different locations;
- The 'Server Intelligence Agent' (SIA), a program that starts monitors and stops servers, is added. It makes the Enterprise-system not dependent anymore on a single CMS;
- It is now possible to create and add your own default security-level next to the existing 'View on Demand', 'Full Control', et cetera;
- The Import Wizard, used for importing objects from different environments and earlier BO versions, is extended and now also allows to import documents on their name only instead of the internal CUID-key.

There is still room for lots of improvements: version-control of objects is still non-existent, event-based scheduling is not well-supported, user-administration cannot be done batchwise and the general user-interface of CMC, despite having been improved, is still a major drawback compared to BO 6 in terms of userfriendliness and understandability.

3)There are optional prompts , i think thsi feature added will remove 'All ' in list of values other new feature is we can see what all data is changed from previous run of report

4)Here are few more differences from design point of view.
The new feature in Webi is the smart measure:
It is a measure that delegates its aggregation calculation to a database. Smart measure performs calculation that the standard Webi aggregation mechanism cannot calculate correctly.

E.g: Complex averages,such as average of a percentage,ratios,etc.. Smart measures are available for all relational and OLAP data sources.

It provides some new Querying functions:
-Delegated LOV search-It delegates the search of values in an LOV to the database.
Features:
1. Prevents LOV from being loaded automatically.
2. Prevents the report user from refreshing the LOV
3. Restricts the data set returned.
4. Limits the load time to one that the report user finds acceptable

-Optional Prompt-applies only to report level prompts not universe prompts.

-Percent rank
It allows the report user to rank a percentage of dimension volume "sliced" on another dimension. This feature is available only on Java report panel.

-Sampling
The query sampling returns specified number of items and selects them randomly.

-Forcemerge

-Data Tracking:
This feature allows a report user to highlight the values that have changed since previous refresh for any level of aggregation.

5)The Designer part of XI3 is enhanced so that we can create universes based on Stored procedures in database which can be easily accessed by business users for generation of webi reports through infoview. There is a huge difference between XIR2 and XI3 infoview in terms of infoview customization.

6)Multilingual support for metadata is now available with the introduction of "Translation Manager".This helps avoiding the rework in replicating the universe for different languages. But this is restricted to only WebIntelligence reports,where by the language setting can be choosen from Infoview settings for "preferred viewing Locale"

7)Few more new features of BO XI3
Support for Nested Derived Tables
Compulsory filters at universe and class level
Custom Drivers
Enhanced SAP BW support

8)There is a security configuration improvement that I consider very helpful. the option to apply security to one object but avoiding to spread it to the lower levels. So you do not have to broke inheritance from each object on the next (lower) level to have this working.