I first met Mark Hudson and members of the Antivia team at the 2008 BOBJ user conference following a presentation, “Xcelsius Web Intelligence Suite”. From that presentation, I knew that Antivia was on a path to change how we think about enterprise connectivity for Xcelsius. Since then, each version of Xcelsius Web Intelligence Suite (XWIS) has significantly improved connectivity and navigation of data from BusinessObjects Enterprise.

With Xcelsius Web Intelligence Suite 2.5 (XWIS), Antivia has continued their innovation streak with so much compelling functionality, that I had difficulty picking out my favorite new features for this article. XWIS 2.5 simplifies the development process for building real, scalable, enterprise dashboards, which is something that organizations have struggled with Live Office and Query as a Web Service. For the first time, developers can meet complex business requirements without laying lots of data connectors with Excel logic. Instead XWIS 2.5 is a scalable solution designed from the ground up to address enterprise dashboard development using Xcelsius or SAP Crystal Dashboard Design as the development platform. The following list is my favorite new features, so make sure you obtain a full list from Antivia.com.

Point and click connectivity to WebI and Crystal Reports- XWIS provides a suite of components that provide direct connectivity to Web Intelligence and now Crystal Reports. With enhanced connectivity management, dashboard developers can re-assemble any combination of measures and dimensions from WebI and Crystal Reports to create true drilldown, hierarchical navigation, and adhoc analysis without data volume limitations or Excel logic.

Autowire- A new feature with XWIS 2.5 is an ability to automatically link standard Xcelsius charts to live data WITHOUT BINDING TO THE SPREADSHEET. Antivia has beat BusinessObjects to the punch, enabling dashboard developers to connect, navigate, drill, and visualize data without a single Excel binding. In addition, Autowire will either synchronize to multiple charts within the dashboard, or provide an in-line chart navigator allowing an end user to toggle between multiple chart types.

Autowire also features in-line chart drilldown while retaining a breadcrumb navigation to drill back up the hierarchy across all chart types.

Connectivity to any source with XMLA and JDBC- For customers who want to access OLAP data sources directly from Xcelsius, XWIS’ new XMLA connectivity option provides the flexibility that developers have been asking for a long time. In addition, an JDBC connectivity option provides and interface to inject your SQL queries directly into XWIS, while retaining the same functionality to navigate and drill they support against WebI or Crystal Reports.


Online/Offline and Bursting- Previously available with XWIS 2.0, dashboard end users can easily save dashboards for offline use, while retaining all of the data from XWIS. I get a ton of requests for this functionality, so I wanted to re-iterate its availability and importance for the future success of Xcelsius. To further expand offline capabilities, XWIS 2.5 now features dashboard bursting integration with BOE Publisher so you can now personalize and distribute Xcelsius dashboard to hundred if not thousands of users.

Custom Hierarchies- Within XWIS components, dashboard developers can create custom hierarchies from Crystal Report and WebI using a simple point and click interface. Now, dashboard developers can map custom hierarchies to match and synchronize non-hierarchical data with point and click ease.

Custom Variables- For dashboard developers who spend lots of time buried in Excel logic, this feature is a major enhancement. Abstracting custom variables to XWIS, developers can leverage report measures to create custom variables for use in the dashboard. This feature among others illustrates that Antivia truly understands how developers have struggled building scalable enterprise applications and delivered an important feature to make development and maintenance much better.


I have highlighted my favorite new features, but there is so much XWIS can do, and the guys at Antivia have many more amazing ideas to make connecting and navigating information in Xcelsius easier than ever.

If your organization is building dashboards on top of BusinessObjects, XWIS 2.5 is a must have. For more information, please visit Antivia.com.

With GMaps Plugin 2.0 locked and loaded for release, we have announced an upcoming webinar so you can quickly get up to speed with what we put into the new version along with a glimpse of what is to come for the rest of this year for GMaps Plugin.

Here is the official webinar intro:

Introducing GMaps Plugin 2.0

Is your organization looking for an interactive geographic analysis application for business intelligence? View Centigon Solutions next generation of GMaps Plugin, Version 2, that will enable your organization to integrate powerful mapping capabilities within your business intelligence dashboards.

Wed, Jun 16, 2010 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
Register

RECORDED WEBINARS

One of the biggest challenges Xcelsius developers face when building dashboards is dynamic filtering of data once it is loaded into the SWF. Whether data originates from Excel or web services, end users require a dynamic user experience that involves filtering and summarizing information on the fly. In cases where data volume is relatively low (under 1500 rows) you should have the flexibility to filter and summarize data on the fly without layers of Excel logic dependencies.

While Xcelsius does not addressed both dynamic filtering and summarization of data out of the box, Filtered Summary plugin does. This component provides maximum flexibility to combine filtering and summarization capabilities together. We built this component with an Xcelsius developer in mind by providing a data preview tab in the property sheet. This gives the developer a quick preview of how the data will look before it is placed into the destination range.

To demonstrate this component and I have started a new dashboard pet project in anticipation of the 2010 world cup. With a full list of matches for the group stage in June, I wanted to provide an interface where an end user could quickly view matches by team or group. Using Filtered Summary, this simple application was built without a reliance on Excel logic or Xcelsius workarounds.
I will continue to refine this particular dashboard as we get closer to World Cup.

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*REQUIRES ESSENTIALS BUNDLE

Software as-a-service applications like Salesforce.com and Google Maps Premier enable organizations of all sizes to offload operational and infrastructure costs associated with on-premise software. Organizations that have made significant investments in on-premise business intelligence are now mashing up data from web-based solutions thanks to powerful APIs. In the last year, Salesforce.com and Google Maps integrations for Xcelsius have popped up making it easier than ever to integrate these technologies without any coding. Third party software solution providers like Centigon Solutions and Moss Solutions are bridging the gaps between these powerful web-based platforms and Xcelsius.

-Read more about this dashboard at EverythingXcelsius.com

GMaps Plugin provides an excellent method for visualizing geographic points on a map that can be aligned to business performance measures. Many customers often ask how many points I can plot on a map at one time. In the Xcelsius world the answer is usually not strait forward since the dashboard often caries an overhead depending on the number of dependencies with components, data, and logic.

The first question I always ask if they are using Latitude, Longitude values or addresses. This has a major impact on performance because an address needs to be geocoded before the icon is renders (this can tabe about 150ms per data point). If you utilize long,lat coordinates there is 0 latency before all data points are drawn on the map.

I would say that 150-300 data points at a time within a Google Map is adequate for expecting good performance on most computers (assuming you are using long,lat). For organizations who require the geocode service, 20-80 is adequate from a user acceptance standpoint because of the latency of the geocode service. The good news is the Google Premier API provides half the latency of the free API.

We have benchmark tested with 1000, which presents sluggish performance with Long,Lat pairs so my recommendation is to restrict the data points that you plot at one time within a map.

If you do not have your address data stored in a "Long,Lat" format I have found a nice batch geocode website that can do the transformation for you: http://www.batchgeocode.com/.

Let me know what your experience is and how you are using these features. If you have not had a chance to test out GMaps Plugin for Xceslsius, you can download a free trial today.