InetSoft 9.0 Release Notes

Last Updated January 24, 2007

Introduction

InetSoft 9.0 is a major feature release. Feature enhancements were made in the following areas:

  • Visualization and exploration capabilities presented by interactive dashboards.
  • Management improvements with significant feature enhancements and a completely new interface.
  • A re-designed portal featuring easier customization and superior user experiences.
  • A built-in map component for easily embedding geographic maps in reports.
  • A robust scorecard implementation that supercedes the alert feature.
  • Other secondary features

Visualization and Exploration (Style Scope)

New interactive dashboards, called viewsheets, allow management to quickly and easily analyze data without knowing how or where the data is stored. Input and selection components make finding the right results a few clicks away. Sophisticated graphical outputs make that data easy to understand, and perfect for board meetings.

An enhanced interface, Visual Composer, has been created for the purpose of designing these visualization assets. This design tool is very drag-and-drop oriented, yet still provides many advanced capabilities. Analysts and savvy managers can help themselves by creating and sharing their own viewsheets.

Improved Management and Administration (Enterprise products)

The administrative interface, Enterprise Manager, has been completely re-designed and rewritten. The improvements focus on easing the task of managing large deployments and user populations. Extensive use of AJAX is employed to enhance the user experience, resulting in a well organized interface with exceptional ease of use.

More importantly, a number of major enhancements have been introduced under the surface, which represent a vast improvement over the previous release. The most notable areas are:

Enhanced Security Model

The security model has been changed to support user and group hierarchies. Users and groups can be organized into trees; children inherit permissions from their parents. This provides fine grained control on resource access, but allows a large user population to be easily managed through a small number of roles and groups.

Built-in Auditing

The new auditing component tracks user actions and access to various resources on the server. The information is stored in a database, and made available through built-in auditing reports.

Automatic Database Integration

For large installations, all configuration information and resources can be stored in a database instead of in files. This allows a cluster environment to operate without a shared file system. The resources can be managed through standard database procedures as part of the operating environment.

Customizable Portal (Enterprise products)

The new user portal features a tabbed interface that can be customized by administrators. It supports multiple themes to match any application integration needs. Individual tabs can be configured through the Enterprise Manager. New tabs can be added by simply supplying a URL. Extensive use of AJAX technology gives users an experience that rivals that of desktop applications.

Map Component

The new map component allows maps to be embedded into reports and dashboards with point and click simplicity. The map displays data at continent, country, state/province, and city levels. It also supports highlighting of map regions based on metrics, and users can drill-down into further detail.

Scorecard (Style Intelligence only)

Scorecards allow users to monitor the performance of pre-defined metrics. A metric is performance data, usually over time. Users can define trends or thresholds that the metric should meet. Actions can be triggered if the goal is not met. Scorecards can be defined by administrators and end users, and subscribed to through the portal.

Other Features

Besides the major feature areas, the other notable enhancements are:

Scheduler Failover (Style Report Enterprise)

In a clustered environment, an application is expected to continue to function when one node goes down. The enhancement to the scheduler extends this same clustering to scheduled and batch reports. In addition to the primary scheduler, a backup scheduler operates in stand-by mode. When the primary fails, the backup takes over and continues the unfinished tasks.

Data SOAP Services (Enterprise products)

With the powerful Asset Composer, users can already build data worksheets that go well beyond what SQL provides. Now the power of the data blocks are no longer limited to reporting. The data SOAP services allow the results of a data worksheet to be accessed from any application through a standard SOAP interface.

Physical Table in Worksheet

Data worksheets can now be connected directly to a database without the requirement of a data model. This greatly increases the versatility of the data manipulation tool. Users can experiment with data and reports without first going through a lengthy data modeling phase.