In the last year I have been submerged in maps for business intelligence dashboards, specifically Google Maps. When I started down the path to create the ultimate mapping solution for Xcelsius, I knew that if it was done thoughtfully it would eventually be something of substantial value both inside and outside of Xcelsius. For now, I will focus on Xcelsius...

In the next week Centigon Solutions will release GMaps Plugin 2.0 for Xcelsius. GMaps Plugin transforms Google Maps Premier into an enterprise mapping solution for dashboards. We have taken a lot of time to understand what kind of maps customers want to do produce within Xcelsius, so the next version will improve and extend features that make maps even easier to produce.

To give you a taste of what you will be able to create, I re-purposed one of our existing sales dashboard demos with GMaps Plugin 2.0.

With the introduction of GMaps Plugin 2.0, I wanted to answer a few common questions that seem to pop-up with every GMaps Plugin / Google Maps discussion I have in a Q&A format:

Q: Why should an organization use Google Maps Premier when there is a free Google Maps API?

A: Google Maps Premier is intended for organizations who want to deploy content on a secured site, or behind a corporate firewall. Since Centigon Solutions is an authorized reseller/OEM for Google Maps Premier, I have seen every possible deployment scenario for Google Maps for enterprise usage. There is zero exceptions where an organization can deploy Google Maps enabled content behind a corporate firewall without requiring a Google Maps Premier license. If you are doing so currently, you are potentially violating Google Maps terms of use, so you may want to double check to see what licensing you have. If you have questions on this, even if you are not using GMaps Plugin, feel free to reach out to me on this and I am more than happy to provide more information on this subject.

Q: Does a cloud-based solution like GMaps Plugin compromise my confidential data?

A: Security and scalability are always top priority for building enterprise solutions. Security is a legitimate concern, anytime a solution communicates with services hosted on a domain outside of the enterprise firewall. GMaps Plugin contains all of the code required to render latitude/longitude data, data icons, tool tips, info windows, labels, polygons, lines, routes, heatmaps, and other metadata that is displayed to the end user. In other words, at no point is any of the information rendered inside of the Google Map or your dashboard for that matter, transacted from your Xcelsius SWF to the Google Maps service. The only exception to this is when you utilize the geocode service to convert address data during SWF runtime. More information is covered on the new GMapsPlugin.com website: GMaps Plugin Security

There is plenty more to come on the new GMapsPlugin.com web site, and I look forward to sharing some exciting new content built with GMaps Plugin 2.0!

Living in southern California and having lived in Los Angeles, the threat of earthquakes is normal. With heavy news coverage of earthquakes these last few weeks, I decided to put together a quick Xcelsius visualization. 15 minutes of research and Xcelsius work led to a Google Map that displays a live XML feed of worldwide earthquakes. Dragging the slider will filter out eathquakes under the user specified magnitude. If anyone has any ideas of some interesting data that I should mashup with the earthquake data feel to share with the group and I will see what I can do to quickly integrate it.

I have included the source files so you can see how it was built.

Source Files
*Requires GMaps Plugin- Get a free trial here.

From strategy to execution, organizations navigate their respective markets carefully as they compete for market share and revenue. Boat racing faces similar challenges for executing against strategy as I learned during a development project for the 2009 SAP 505 World Championships. For this race, I assisted with the development of a race strategy/execution dashboard that couples business intelligence dashboard technology with sailing technology and domain knowledge. The resulting collaborative effort led to the development of an innovative dashboard.

This Xcelsius dashboard features two modes: strategy and race (execution). Strategic planning requires cultivation of information from many different sources. While data retrieval presents unique challenges, mashing it together in one visual compilation is another. For this particular dashboard, vendors and domain experts collaborated to produce powerful results in an extremely short period of time.

To plan either business or race strategy, you need to predict conditions and then plot a course of action. Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 505 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.

Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.

All of this information is fed through Xcelsius into Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin, which was extended to meet the challenges of this project.

A public facing version of this dashboard is available for you to viewing at: http://explorer.sap.com/505/ and during the event, will include real-time commentary feed by renowned sailing expert Kimball Livingston.

As a huge college basketball fan, more specifically a die-hard Duke fan, I recently got into a heated debate about what school has the most top draft picks. So of course that sparked an interesting dashboard idea, with the NBA finals and upcoming NBA draft this month.

The result is an Xcelsius dashboard with all of the NBA Draft Lottery picks since 1985. My goal was to enable dynamic analysis of any date range for the top X draft picks. Whether analyzing top 5 draft picks or top 10 picks, I wanted to dynamically see what colleges produced the top number of draft picks.

At the same time, you can click on any team or college within the bar chart to see the individual players who were drafted.

To build this dashboard, I used a combination of a few workarounds and Centigon Solutions plugin components including Filtered Summary, Dynamic Sort, and Background Builder. Without these components, this particular dashboard would have been near impossible.

I am going to provide the source files for this particular dashboard and do a few articles about specific workarounds, so you can learn a few new tricks of the trade while having the opportunity to use add-on components to build this type of analysis.



View Dashboard

Filtered Summary
Used to dynamically count the number of players drafted to NBA teams, Filtered Summary provides a critical calculation layer to drive the analysis as you increase or decrease the number of years or draft numbers. Rather than relying on cumbersome, performance hindering logic, Filtered Summary continuously evaluates every player drafted from 1985 and then generates a summary table that is visualized in a bar chart.

Dynamic Sort
When Filtered Summary generates a dynamic count for each NBA team or College for where players are drafted, dynamic sort will automatically re-sort the data in place so the graph can visually represent the number of players in a descending order. With 2 simple properties, you can enable sorting and ranking with no impact to performance and no Excel logic.

Background Builder
To create a professional looking user interface, Background Builder was utilized to enclose all components into a single dashboard. With un-intrusive gradients and textures background builder can create a wide range of graphical styles. In the NBA dashboard background builder was combined with a brown color scheme aligned to basketball. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can easily re-configure background builder to a less flashy color scheme.

Here is a dashboard that I created this morning after flipping through the channels dominated by Swine Flu news. Plotted in the Google Map is a visual representation of the number of cases confirmed by the CDC in each city. This data is refreshed as the CDC website is updated along with an up to the minute RSS feed.

Update:5/7- CDC moved the swine flu page again so I updated it with a new zoom feature.