Thanks to the Recaptcha (www.recaptcha.net), I have re-enabled comments on my blog. Hopefully that does the trick… I have also cleaned up the garbage spam comments, and restored all of your existing comments. I welcome you to continue making suggestions and providing feedback for the posts that I provide.
Thank you for your continued support.
-Ryan Goodman
This week, I wanted to discuss recent developments in dashboard development using Xcelsius. In looking at the marketplace and how dashboards have evolved, Xcelsius has remained a popular tool for building business intelligence dashboards. I wanted to outline my experiences in this 3-part series and hopefully provide some valuable information as you plan your next dashboard project.
Part 1: Observations- How we derive value from dashboards today.
Part 2: Opportunities- Technology gaps and how to fill them in.
Part 3: Available Solutions- Extend and improve dashboards with add-ons.
Part 1: Observations
The overall value of a dashboard as we know it today is to simplify the process for delivering information to business users, while painting a picture of current performance as it relates to strategy and/or processes. The resulting benefit of this simplification is to reach and empower more people within an organization to identify problems, improve efficiencies, and ultimately seek new opportunities.
While a dashboard and its contents look different for every customer, the underlying methods are similar in how you derive value from dashboards.
Part 2, Opportunities
Next, I will identify opportunities for improving dashboards with Xcelsius.
Several Xcelsius users who have tried to use add-on components have reported that Xcelsius crashes when accessing the add-on manager. As it turns out, it is Windows Vista’s User Account Control that causes the crash. UAC is the first feature I naturally turn off when ever I image a new machine with Vista so I had never experienced this issue. In turning off UAC, you allow Xcelsius to execute and install add-ins.
Here are the steps to disable this Vista feature:
If you are running 64 bit windows operating systems, the Add-on manager crash is a logged bug with BOBJ and hopefully will be fixed in the next Xcelsius release.
Here are a few webinars that I am presenting next month. Assuming we get a good turnout, I will continue to present more technical topics to make these as valuable as possible.
-Visit the Centigon Solutions webinar page.
Date: Thursday, March 12, 2009
Introducing Centigon Solutions Plugin Components for Xcelsius 2008
Presenters: Ryan Goodman, Evan Delodder
Target Audience: Xcelsius developers/customers
· How the current suite of Centigon Solutions Plugin components work
· Real example use cases and success stories
· Sneak preview of what is coming next from Centigon Solutions
Register Now
Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009
Centigon Solutions plugins for Consulting Partners
Presenters: Ryan Goodman
Target Audience: Consultants/Consulting Partners
· How Centigon Solutions can save valuable time in enterprise dashboard development
· Real example use cases and success stories
· Opportunities and benefits from becoming a Centigon Solutions partner
Register Now
Here is a simple trick for re-arranging tabs within an Xcelsius Tab Set component. The issue is once you add tabs, there is not a built in component property to chage tab order. However, if you open the object browser window, you can see that the tabs are organized in as sub-groups.
Before:
Changing the order of these groups will affect the tab ording in the component. With a canvas selected, you can hit the “-” or “+” key on your keyboard to move the tab forward or backward. Otherwise you can leverage the built in down and up arrows within the object browser. I advise aganist clicking and dragging the canvas within the object browser, since it can break the component if you drag it incorrectly.
After:
I heavily advise that you name the canvases to match the tab names to avoid confusion. Hopefully this will help you avoid re-building your container component just to modify tab order.
