InetSoft Webinar: Live BI Dashboard Deployments

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft introducing the new features in the version 12 release of Style Intelligence. The speakers are Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and Byron Igoe, Principal Technologist at InetSoft.

Igoe: In the past we had live BI dashboard deployments where you could exactly copy things that you have built out into a remote environment. Now we support multiple environments right here within Style Studio so I can easily switch over to my production server or to the development server. And so using a development server directly, the left hand side now updates to show me additional sources that are defined in that environment, and I can also connect directly to that remote report repository.

So here I can open up a report from the development server’s repository, right here within Style Studio, any changes that I make and save will be saved directly back to the server. And so that this is a really good way to do a live development, or make some quick changes based on an issue or some requests that’s come out for a change without having to go through a full development and deployment cycle.

Additionally, when I have a report, I can basically save the report either as a file and this is the whole behavior as an SRT and then manually deploy that report out, or I can also save it back into the repository automatically creating a new entry, and so it can be run from the Web interface. And lastly, when I deploy this report, my deployment dialog now has two options, either deploying out to a repository, for example, deploying from the development server to the production server.

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And it includes all of the dependencies. Or, I can deploy out to the desktop. So this is very similar to the incremental deployment feature that we have in the enterprise manager where I can save a report as a package, a bundle that includes all of the dependencies that are necessary to run this report. Those are the main things that I wanted to cover. I am going to turn back over to Mark now, and we will try to answer some of your questions.

Flaherty: Sure. So the first one is, do you support BlackBerries?

Igoe: Sure. So BlackBerry devices especially the tablets I think are sort of following suit with Apple. We really targeted the iPad for the multi-touch interface of the HTML version of viewsheets and the interactive dashboards. But what I think they are mostly compatible with BlackBerries as well. We will be doing further research into particularly BlackBerry Tablets, and Android Tablets in the future.

Flaherty: Okay what kinds of databases can you connect to?

Igoe: Essentially Style Intelligence can connect to any database that has a JDBC driver or an ODBC driver. So that includes Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Ingres, Postgress SQL, Sybase Cache, Cloud Scape, and Derby. I can go on and on many. Many databases out there support the JDBC and ODBC standards.

Flaherty: Okay. Can the software run in a .NET environment?

Igoe: Yes, absolutely. We depend on Java, and so our software would run inside of a Java Application Server. You would have to have Java installed, but we have many, many customers who have embedded our reporting in dashboards within their own ASP, .NET, Csharp .net Web interface. Front end integration is really as easy as calling the right URL and either popping up a window or embedding it within an iFrame. So the backend technologies don’t really make that much of a difference.

Flaherty: What are the security options?

Igoe: We have security at every level so at the asset level you can have permissions at the folder, report and dashboard level. Then you can also have security and permissions at the functionality level. This controls who is allowed to create their own report, who is allowed to export to excel, who is allowed to schedule a report and then all the way down to the data level as well. So you can essentially have the same report run by two different users who have different permissions, and it will show them different data based on what they are allowed to see.

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Flaherty: Okay. Another question is about data access, and we may have mentioned Microsoft Access before, but the question is can it connect to Microsoft Access?

Igoe: Absolutely. So Microsoft Access has an ODBC driver, and we use the JDBC, ODBC bridge to connect to it. I also forgot to mention DB2 which is a very popular database, where we are also compatible with that.

Flaherty: Is mobile support only browser based or do you have any native support for the devices?

Igoe: So we are targeting just the browser so that there is no special app to install. The hope is also that we can develop a single solution that would support the iPad, the Blackberry and Android Tablets including the multi-touch support by using the browser standards. That way we don’t have to support multiple code bases, and we can have a much more stable solution for mobile.

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