Monster sightings, coffee consumption, sports statistics, and internet usage, instrument buying habits.... These are the subjects for the first wave of submissions from SAP's Reportapalooza.

This event squares off some of our technology / community thought leaders for Crystal Reports and Xcelsius through a series of challenges. The first challenge was a dashboard bake-off, where experts were given a short period of time to transform a fun subject matter into an interesting dashboard dashboard. The emphasis is clearly on cool factor as all contestants provided their design flare and Xcelsius wizardry. I am extremely impressed with how each contestant introduced their subject in a unique visual interface.

One of my favorites is the Coffee Consumption tool created by my colleague Miko Yuk from EverythingXcelsius, uses a basic form approach to collect user information while providing statistical coffee consumption facts. The payoff at the end is a plain text analysis of your coffee drinking habits. Mico also made very good use of GMaps Plugin showing regional and location based analysis.

Another cool idea is a monster sightings dashboard by Jamie Oswald where you can tweet submissions and then view your tweet inside of GMaps Plugin.

Jim Brogden also leveraged GMaps Plugin to display community bands using addresses across the United States. There is a log of interesting statistical factoids in here worth digging into.

I absolutely love what all of the designers implemented as each dashboard provides unique information illustrating how flexible Xcelsius is from a design standpoint. I apologize for not covering them all in detail, but I highly recommend that you check all of the dashboards out to get great ideas for your dashboard projects.

I like that we have something that is fun to look at with Reportapalooza and look forward to reporting on the next challenge!

Since I started building business intelligence dashboards with Xcelsius in 2003, maps have always been a weakness. Until the last year, customers who develop dashboards with Xcelsius had few choices when it came to visualizing geographic data.

In the last few years, my team and I have narrowed Centigon Solution’s strategic focus from business intelligence dashboards to geo-visualization for BI, and the process have changed the way we think about maps for Xcelsius with GMaps Plugin. Customers now have a single tool capable of rendering data points (places, people, locations) and regions (thematic maps, routes, shapes) together within a single interface. This is only a single step forward to meet any requirement for BI dashboards. My goal is to empower anyone in an organization to construct interactive maps. We are very close to having the ultimate mapping design tool for business users capable of addressing most complex business requirements with point and click ease.

Our approach to software design is very simple… Start with the business user mind and work our way backwards toward integration. This was a mantra that quickly propelled Xcelsius as a leading dashboard development tool. When business users think about maps, Google/Bing/Yahoo/Mapquest maps are at the top of the list. Google was my first and only choice for approaching a business focused maps application. Google has extremely powerful maps API, infrastructure and SLAs to ensure scalability for unlimited users, and have an enterprise focus to ensure we can meet the rigid security requirements customers have. Furthermore Google maintains their own Maps Flash API where Microsoft uses a third party for Bing Maps, which is an extra layer of abstraction that we did not want to fight with.

In speaking with many dashboard developers and business stakeholders, few maps requirements are the same, though we have figured out commonalities, allowing us to expand and improve GMaps Plugin methodically. Next month, Centigon Solutions will release GMaps Plugin 2.1 for Xcelsius which is a huge leap forward both in performance and map design flexibility. 2.1 is also important for another reason, allowing GMaps Plugin to live outside of Xcelsius which I will share for the first time at the BusinessObjects user conference at a session entitled “Xcelsius+GMaps+15 min.- Coding=Must See!”

I will start posting sneak peeks as we on-board our GMaps Plugin power users for beta testing next week. If you are interested in becoming one of our beta users, let me know.

For more information about GMaps Plugin 2.0, visit http://GMapsPlugin.com

I am happy to have finally released the latest version of CSV Connector today. I would like to thank our Centigon Solutions power users and customers for providing us feedback through our private beta program.

For those of you who may not have seen CSV Connector, this Xcelsius data connection allows you to connect directly to CSV files, eliminating the requirements for web services or XML. Most of our existing customers use it to update Excel-based dashboards without re-generating SWFs. Others use it to automate data refresh from legacy reporting systems that don't have web service APIs.

The two major additions to this new version are runtime aggregation and export capabilities.

Runtime Aggregation: We had a ton of requests to combine Filtered Summary capabilities with CSV Connector and we have delivered on that promise. Developers can now filter and summarize a single CSV file with thousands of records down to smaller bits appropriate for Xcelsius consumption without loading the entire CSV payload into Excel.

This model has 2 connections that load and aggregate 3,000 rows of data on the fly. No Excel logic with minimal bindings creates a fast performing and easy to maintain dashboard.
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Export Capabilities: One of long standing feature requests by Xcelsius customers is an ability to export data. The current version of Xcelsius uses Flex v2, which restricts us from exporting data from a SWF to the local PC. The most efficient alternative is to use a simple web service to transact data from a SWF to a physical CSV file. CSV Connector provides a simple property sheet tab to configure export capabilities making this export process seamless to end users.

Download Source Files

Web Service Availability: The web services that process data from CSV Connector are very basic, so we decided to release these services as open projects, allowing developers to access and install the export services for free. This allows us to update and improve the services much faster than our typical release schedule for CSV Connector, while using the community to help us make the most powerful solution possible across multiple platforms.

We have released CSV Connector ready services for .NET and PHP with JSP on its way.

When we built GMaps Plugin, Google Maps Premier powered integration for Xcelsius dashboards, I realized an instant workable solution for Crystal Reports, even though there are already a variety of powerful map solutions available. With GMaps Plugin 2.1 release around the corner, we will be one step closer to producing powerful Google Maps enabled views for use in Crystal Reports.

Though Centigon Solutions has not announced any formal GMaps Plugin support for Crystal Reports, I have been playing around in my free time with GMaps Plugin coupled with the Crystal Reports connector as a simple bridge to Crystal Reports integration. While evaluating some of the business cases for these technologies working together, I have engaged several experts to see how their customers may value this integration.

I am curious from my fellow Xcelsius and Crystal Reports gurus how you would envision a Google Maps enabled Crystal Report to bring real business value. While mashing up technologies is fun, it is practical utility that I am after. I will shortly post how to drag and drop Google Maps into a Crystal Report using GMaps Plugin.

I wanted to understand developer and customer opinions of add-on components are for Xcelsius. Over the last few years we have seen a series of 3rd party vendors create amazing solutions to make Xcelsius the best that it can be. I am also aware of both small and large enterprise organizations that have created their own custom add-on solutions.

Bottom line, there are many Xcelsius customers who currently leverage add-ons as part of their dashboard development initiative and SAP may not realize how wide spread the adoption rate is. I know hard numbers do not lie, so I created a poll on Linked-in where you can chime in and help us make the case why the SDK is so important for the future success of Xcelsius. I think it has fallen low on the priority list so I want to put the spotlight on the SDK.

PLEASE PROVIDE YOUR VOTE AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE!