Product overview: BusinessObjects XI 3

Front-ends

There are now effectively four ways of delivering BusinessObjects content, all using InfoView, the Business Objects’ BI portal. Business Objects offers Portal Integration Kits to tier-one portals from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, BEA and IBM.

• Windows client/server, using various products from the portfolio with a thin or thick client
• Web, using WebIntelligence including links to portals
• Wireless, using InfoView Mobile Edition
• Excel, using Live Office.

Unlike Cognos and MicroStrategy, Business Objects did not join the rush for a unified front end. The company has resisted conventional wisdom in this area. It grew by acquiring new products and has worked to make these products interact in the area of metadata and report publishing.

Ad hoc reporting

WebIntelligence is intended as the replacement for Desktop Intelligence. The format of the reports is similar but not identical. As an illustration of the real differences between the products, the expression delimiter in Desktop Intelligence was the HTML-style ‘<>’ pair but it is square brackets in WebIntelligence. This means that in Desktop Intelligence is [Revenue] in WebIntelligence. Fortunately, there is a conversion tool which converts nearly all reports. However, there are still features in Desktop Intelligence that WebIntelligence does not support, such as the ‘fit to page’ in the printouts, and support for stored procedures.

WebIntelligence with InfoView allows browser users to see complex reports previously developed in Desktop Intelligence and run new, simpler (single-table) queries. New complex reports cannot be defined, but can be run with auto prompts. Ad hoc WebIntelligence reports can contain multiple tables and charts, which can be optionally synchronized to other tables and charts. This is helpful when users want to drill on one display object and see changes propagated to the other display objects as well. A query panel provides a drag-and-drop environment for defining the queries.

Report output can appear on the screen, printer, e-mail, HTML document, PDF files and Excel spreadsheets. HTML pages can be used to build and maintain report output pages in a website. These are static pages, although they can be refreshed regularly.

WebIntelligence is now a much more capable offering than the first release. It now supports a variety of calculations including arithmetic, period-to-date, conditional and aggregate functions. But even now, WebIntelligence still falls short of the thick client.

In the XI Release 3 two major steps were taken to make WebIntelligence a replacement for Desktop Intelligence. First, WebIntelligence can now access local files as data sources. Second, it can be used off-line in the form of the WebIntelligence rich client.

WebIntelligence is one of the most widely used Web-based ad hoc products on the market. It is known for the following strengths:

• Fast creation of relatively complex ad hoc reports
• Ease of use
• Connection to both OLAP and relation sources
• Strong semantic layer that hides complexity from the end user
• Zero footprint deployment.

But WebIntelligence is based on report writer metaphors such as report breaks, and the need to place headers on the page. Generally speaking, the screen appears as a window on a paper report, rather than the primary display. This can seem strange to OLAP users with more experience of tools with an EIS background, and we feel that the user interface is not as strong as in some competing products.

The views in WebIntelligence are made up of ‘sections’, which are separated by breaks when members of the dimensions defining the sections change. The sections can contain bitmaps as well as block holding lists, multidimensional cross tabs and charts, which can be positioned independently in the section. In the future, we expect maps to be available as well. The layout is similar to the band system usually seen in page-based reporting system such as Crystal Reports.

WebIntelligence puts ease of use ahead of functionality. For example, full-blown relational report writers such as Cognos 8 Report Studio can produce a wider range of reports. However, this is no longer a problem for Business Objects, now that it also owns Crystal. The result is a product that is not the best of breed at anything it does, even within its own portfolio. Crystal Xcelsius is better at creating dashboards and charts, Crystal is better at creating page-based reports, Voyager is specialized for OLAP analysis (but it is a very young product), and WebIntelligence is still better for simple analysis.

There are other minor problems with the WebIntelligence user experience. Here are a few examples:

• Dragging a column into a report is simply too difficult. It requires very precise mouse movements.
• There is a ‘+’ in front of the folder even when it contains no folders. Also, the user has to click the ‘+’ instead of the name of the folder to expand the list. The ‘+’ also disappears when the folder contains reports.
• To make life easier for the user, double clicking a column could add it on the right side of the table. Instead, it does nothing.
• The undo function is limited to a few steps and there is no redo.
• The formula editor is modeled on a spreadsheet, but Excel users will find it lacking in interactivity.
• The operator descriptions in the formula editor are almost always limited to repeating the name of the formula. Getting more help requires an additional mouse click. This detail seems to have been forgotten.
• Linking to other reports has improved in release 3 but it still involves dealing with URLs, something that cost report designers a lot of time.
• Copying formats is not possible, and neither is copying any content between reports. There is no template function.

All these are small issues, but in sum they make the product more difficult to use than Cognos or MicroStrategy. The company counters that the product contains a variety of subtle productivity features that more than make up for this, such as a new feature that highlights changes between report versions. In any event, it is noticeable that release 3 has improved upon release 2 in this area in several ways.

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