Report developers are ready to go.

In the age of big data, companies are finding it challenging to utilize their existing data to its full potential. The value is not in the data, it is in how the data is interpreted and accessed. The goal of business analytics is to collect, organize, and display relevant data to key stakeholders.

In the current environment where every company is seeking cost cutting measures, outsourcing non-core activities to experienced third parties is becoming increasingly common. Business Intelligence, data management, and report development are some key examples of managed services that vendors offer to such companies.

Vendors such as IBM, are redefining the managed services concept that was earlier limited to application support. Specifically, outsourcing report development has become part of the strategic thinking process for a growing number of companies who leverage the data at their disposal.

Key questions when managing report development:

1. How to find a technology expert who can leverage data and generate reports for business units, in a short period of time?
2. What would be the most cost effective manner to have a long term relationship with someone who can bring resource pooling agility and reduce the risks associated with staff turnover?

These days vendors provide report development as a managed service to their clients. Vendors work with their customers on various projects with the help of their dedicated global team.

Benefits of using a managed service for report development:

• Overhead cost control: Managed services help reduce the IT department’s overhead costs by providing an efficient alternative to in-house report development and query writing. This also frees up management to focus on more strategic endeavours.
• Agile process: Managed services enable agility and scalability of report development at highly competitive rates.
• Access to experts: Companies get easy access to expert report developers. Companies can tap into world-class expertise and higher quality at a fraction of the cost of hiring or contracting a specialist – this is especially true when migrating from one reporting system to another.
• No risk of losing skills from staff turnover: Companies eliminate risks of losing critical skills in a volatile employment market and lessen the need to hire and ramp up new employee talent for extremely critical technology(ies).
• Continuous availability and on demand bandwidth: Vendors who provide local delivery and global report development offer 24 X 7 services to their clients. Additionally, companies benefit from the flexible bandwidth during development and release cycles.
• Industry standard IT governance: Good vendors make sure that there is industry standard IT governance that leads to extensive customer satisfaction. This will generate a higher value alternative to internal delivery and a higher success rate.

Managed services are not only limited to report development, they also extends to the complete business intelligence portfolio, including cloud offerings. We are seeing many vendors similar to Optimus expanding in this horizon to provide end-to-end business intelligence as a managed service, such as Teradata. In my view “Report Development as a Managed Service” is a flexible and needs-based model that allows companies to access resources at the most efficient price point.

Optimus provides report development services in Vancouver, Canada. We have expertise to develop cross-platform and cross-applications reports. We specialize in Mircosoft SSRS, Crystal Reports and other open source tools. If you would like to learn more about our report development process and experience, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to sit down and discuss your needs.

(image credit: lumaxart)

Featured speakers at Wavefront's mobile application event.

This week I went down to mPowerBusiness, hosted by Wavefront, to see what’s the latest in the enterprise mobile space. The event was packed with more than 15 speakers in a single track. The range of experience and expertise amongst the speakers was a major highlight. From entrepreneurs building mobile solutions for consumers to titans from Samsung, RIM and the Executive Director of the Office of the CIO of BC (who had some very interesting details about the NFC chip being put into BC driver’s licenses in late 2012).

Almost all of the speakers preambled their session with why mobile is important. We’ve heard it all before – mobile is the biggest thing since sliced bread. Well it’s official and enterprises are trying to catch up. My favorite stats came from Jonathan Carrigan, Product Development manager at the CBC. He illustrated that mobile devices are being used for much more than quickly checking email and doing 30-second tasks. He explained that at the CBC they’ve seen a massive amount of mobile traffic hitting their websites and mobile apps to watch full length TV shows and spend hours interacting with their content.

Here are a few key stats from his speech:

• In 2007 (the year the iPhone launched), mobile traffic grew by 3000%
• In 2011, mobile traffic grew by 160%
• 1/4 of CBC’s total traffic online is from mobile devices
• By 2013, they expect mobile traffic to surpass desktop/laptop traffic
• 75-80% of their mobile traffic is from iOS devices
• In regards to tablets, a full 80% visitors are using an iPad

BYOD

Bring-your-own-device is not a new trend in the enterprise space, it’s just becoming commonplace. It used to be the norm to be issued a Blackberry on your first day at the job, but now employees will often already have a high powered smartphone that they’re comfortable with. Enterprises can either resist employees using their own devices or empower them to use whichever device they like. If the employee already has a good phone, they’re likely to end up carrying both.

BYOD is a pain for enterprise IT because they need to support more platforms, devices, operating systems, and applications. The days of the one size fits all “Blackberry enterprise” are gone and quickly replaced by a slew of iPhones, Androids, Blackberries, and soon to be Windows Phones.

The challenge for IT is to make sure employees have access to the data they need; meanwhile, retaining the ability to remove that data when the device is lost or the employee leaves the company. This is handled by MDM.

MDM

Mobile device management handles the first challenge by managing the core business functions: email, calendars, and address books – all with reliable encryption and remote wipe capabilities. From a device perspective, Android (specifically Samsung devices) has taken this challenge head on by packing their OS with hardware encrypted interfaces with Microsoft Exchange Server. This enables Android users (much like myself) to link their default mail client to Exchange email servers while IT can remote wipe their device if it’s forget it on the subway.

From a server perspective, I was really pleased to hear that Blackberry is improving their BES to support management of Android and iOS devices. This is a great move by Blackberry to incentivize their 275,000 BES customers to continue using RIM’s infrastructure even as users are diversifying their mobile devices.

CoIT and MAM

The consumerization-of-IT (aka CoIT), is the increasing expectations of employees to freely install applications from app stores such as the iTunes App Store or the Android Marketplace. That’s all fine and good, but how do employees get access to custom enterprise apps? That’s where mobile-application-management (MAM) solutions come in.

MAM solutions enable IT to create their own private app store where employees can select and install applications of their choosing. From there they can deploy off-the-shelf apps and apps built specifically for their company. A MAM, such as Partnerpedia‘s, will then handle all the details of deployment, licensing, and revoking access.

Another major advantage of a MAM is that it supports BYOD. Users can use their own device, install the custom app store and run both Angry Birds (from public app stores) and their company’s private apps side-by-side. Then when the employee leaves, the company can revoke access without destroying the employee’s coveted Angry Birds high scores.

HTML5 vs Native Apps

As the spirited J. Joly hit the stage, I thought the crowd was going to erupt in a debate about the native VS web-based app mobile development approaches. J and his team at dimeRocker have been killing it on the HTML5 side and demonstrating how powerful web-based applications can be. Between him and Carrington, from CBC, they had some pretty convincing arguments about why to start with a web-based approach.

I’ve spoken at length of the benefits of starting with an HTML5 development strategy, so you know where I stand and almost all speakers echoed the same sentiment. With a mobile strategy start small. Pick a few easy wins and get it out the door. Pick one user and solve their problem, then expand. Often this approach is well suited to an HTML5 (read: web-based) solution. If the application is mainly there to display data and interact with forms, then web-based is the most efficient approach from both a cost and timeline perspective.

From there, if the web-app picks up and proves useful for the company – it may be time to consider more powerful native applications.

LBS and NFC

The last two common themes at this year’s mPowerBusiness was location-based-services (LBS) and near-field-communication (NFC). Now that we’re all walking around with GPS enabled smartphones in our pockets, there are a lot of location based services taking off. Rob Goerhring from Contigo (cleverly named after the Spanish word for “with me”), spoke of the powerful (and sometimes privacy invading) opportunities to track shipments, equipment, and even people. His service enables companies to track what’s important to their business and he shared lots of interesting case studies.

Tracking shipments and vehicles is an obvious application, but how about tracking remote or isolated workers? By using LBS, companies are able to make sure their workers are safe – in the event a worker is in peril, they have a location enabled panic button that can trigger emergency services. The key concerns when using LBS is that the business is using it to improve efficiency and safety as oppose to employee monitoring.

NFC is our little tech darling that is yet to be – in Canada at least. Only a fraction of smartphones in the market are NFC enabled, but that will rapidly change. We’re all on 1-3 year hardware refresh cycles and our next devices will likely be NFC enabled. These devices will power a plethora of previously pocket packing products: key cards, transit passes, driver’s licenses, care cards, payment methods, to name only a few. While we’re stuck scanning QR codes, they’re already using NFC regularly in Japan.

–

Optimus provides mobile application development services in Vancouver, Canada. We develop cross-platform mobile applications using both HTML5 and native languages. We specialize in HTML5, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. If you’d like to learn more about the mobile application development process and what it would take to get a mobile app made for your company, give us a call. We’d be glad to sit down and discuss your needs.

(image credit: Wavefront)

SSRS Reports are well integrated with the Microsoft stack.

Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a flexible platform, incorporating a centrally managed reporting system and on-demand web-based and desktop applications. From report writing to deployment, this complete reporting platform supports the entire report life-cycle.

Based on our experiences in SSRS report development, SSRS is an ideal tool for business intelligence reporting due to the following key factors:

Five Styles of Business Intelligence

The five styles of BI are:

1. Reporting: Operational and financial reports that are mainly used by the junior to mid level management to facilitate their day-to-day work
2. Scorecards and Dashboards: Graphical representation of data that is mainly used by the senior level executives to monitor the organization’s performance
3. Ad-hoc query and analysis: Interactive reporting mainly used for scenario analysis
4. OLAP analysis: Simple form of analysis that uses standard features such as page-by, pivot, sort, filter and drill up/down to flip through a series of report views.
5. Alerting and Report Delivery: Proactive notification/reports that will be delivered directly to the users (via email, web, or XML files) whenever a critical  alert, alarm or system event occurs

SSRS is a single technology where all five styles can be used as plug-and-play modules. It allows companies to post reports as download items to a portal, email them to users, or allow users access via a web-based report server. Users can locate and run the reports as required using subscription, search and navigation features. Through personalized subscriptions, users can select the versioned format they prefer to personalize the reports.

Data and User Scalability

Companies collect and generate an enormous volume and scope of data over the years. The infinite number of systems in an organization, including supply chain management, sales force automation, ERP, websites and also CRM, contribute to this massive data influx.

SSRS and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), when combined, can access very large databases, while comfortably interacting with the users. High volume environments can be supported by the scalability of its modularity and web-based design. As more people use the system, the performance is enhanced by a dynamic multi-level caching architecture, which makes each user’s experience faster and more interactive, while imposing the minimum load on database resources. One could serve thousands of web-based clients though creating a reporting server farm with multiple report servers accessing the same core reports.

Self Serve BI – Ad hoc Reporting

With the increase in user base and the amount of data, user self-service becomes critical. Users can create their own operational or financial reports and explore organizational data using an SSRS ad hoc reporting tool. Users without deep technical understanding can build reports through Report Builder’s user-friendly business query model.

Granular Analytic Capability

SSRS reports incorporate drill down and parameterized functionality, which has become standard in today’s BI market. Company’s performance can be easily measured with the help of SSRS’s advanced functionalities. By combining data planning and trending, SSRS can be used to provide valuable insights to future performances.

Security and administration

To protect reporting resources, SSRS implements a flexible and role-based security model. This model ensures that every employee of the organization is allowed access to data which their user role entitles them to. By using SSRS’s extensible interfaces, other security models can be easily integrated.

Microsoft Office integration

SSRS integrates with Microsoft Office products seamlessly. The end-user can view and manage reports completely from within a SharePoint document library. Additionally, SSRS can provide pixel perfect reporting by exporting reports into Excel and PDF. There is no requirement of any programming or customization for this integration. It also increases the productivity of the users due to it’ s familiar desktop environment.

Branding and Presentation

SSRS enables company branding with picture perfect formatting. Adding the company logo and client information with reports documents is a simple process due to the ease of integration with Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF.

Automated Maintainability

Through SSRS, reports can be updated automatically, reflecting continual changes to fundamental business definitions,  structures and database. All users have access to a single version of truth through the centrally defined and managed business rules provided by SSRS.

Cost Effective

SSRS is already available with an Enterprise or Standard edition of Microsoft SQL Server. If a company already has these running, it does not need spend extra money for purchasing SSRS. This is one of the key benefits of the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack which provide a complete set of tools for end-to-end BI solutions.

SSRS has the lowest licensing cost among the leading business intelligence vendors. This provides a cost effective benefit for companies that without any SQL Server, but are inclined to buy Microsoft’s BI stack. Additionally, the server-based license model of SQL Server is definitely more cost-effective compared to per-user-based licenses.

Open APIs

Traditional and interactive reports can be created, managed, and delivered through a complete, server-based platform offered by Reporting Services. Additionally, with the help of its modular design and extensive application programming interfaces (APIs), enterprises, data providers and software developers can integrate reporting services with legacy systems or third-party applications. Other environments such as Visual Studio .Net development can be easily integrated with SSRS.

To learn more about SSRS report development, connect with us. We are happy to provide free consultations.

The evolution of software testing services.

I’m not sure who coined the word ‘Software-as-a-Service”, but Salesforce.com have certainly capitalized on it and packaged it as a concept, an idea, a way of thinking and most importantly have successfully monetized it.

Any on-demand service has an extension of ‘as-a-service’. Testing is no exception. In the following few paragraphs, I will try to map this concept with real world scenarios and hopefully give our readers a flavour as to where we are heading, from a Testing & QA perspective, in the next few months to come.

Over the past couple of months, we spoke to over 50 companies in British Columbia, Canada. This included the likes of CIOs, VP Engineering, IT Directors, QA Managers and Testers.

We approached them with couple of pointed question:

1. What are your pain areas around Testing & QA?
2. What are your % budget allocation (quantitative) / mindshare (qualitative) to Testing & QA?

Our take away from all the meetings:

1. 85% of the target audience were certain that they need help on Testing & QA.

Of this 85%, they can be categorized into 3 categories:

1. Needing help on improving their overall QA processes.
2. Needing help on plain execution of their test cases.
3. Needing help to move towards higher level of automation.

Incidentally, although Testing & QA is an area of importance, decision makers are unable to quantify the budget allocation nor able to dedicate mindshare to it. The primary reason is the apprehension of needing on-going testing support. They would rather prefer it on an on-demand basis.

This was enough food for thought for us to realise the benefit of ‘Testing-as-a-Service’ and how it can help organisations lower their total cost of ownership and guarantee predictable outcomes, across the lifespan of the development cycle.

Testing has come a long way from being a FTE (full-time equivalent) driven way of working, to ‘as-a-service way’ of thinking.

The evolution of software testing services.

*Source: Optimus Information

We all remember those good old days of multi-year contracts, where vendors use to layout the buffet and testing use to be just another line item. Then the offshoring wave kicked-in and dedicated testing teams were deployed overnight. The concept of the Testing-Center-of-Excellence started taking shape. This resulted in segregation in Development and Maintenance contracts which led to the foundation of Independent Testing Vendors across the globe.

However current market shifts compelled organisations to take a step back and rethink their business model. Incidentally, Testing & QA fell into the on-demand category. Testing-as-a-Service thus became an evolutionary approach, where the risks are further being distributed across the board.

As we delved further into it, we observed some key subtleties of this concept:

1. Testing-as-a-Service is not the same as cloud based testing. The latter is an activity / means to an end, while Testing-as-a-Service is a framework, a unique way of approaching Testing & QA, independent of vendors and tools, which traditionally been considered as an activity.
2. Defining the objective of the Testing-as-a-Service model: 1) Predictable outcomes, 2) Move towards an on-demand pricing model 3) Lower TCO. Organisations should demand a result based invoices rather than effort based invoices, raised typically at the end of every month. This will be factored into the model.
3. Start with areas where possibility of automation is greater. Testing-as-a-Service model works very well where need is well defined and understood. This might seem like a ‘catch-22’ situation for certain organisations. In this case, this model may not be the best one to begin with; however necessary due diligence should be done for future benefits and adaptation of this model.
4. Organisations should work closely with their testing tool vendors to factor in licensing cost in the model. One of the approaches is to amortize the license cost of the tool over the span of the usage. However, leading vendors such as HP, SmartBear, Microsoft, offers an on-demand licensing portfolio.

All said and done, these are some industry accepted approaches. In the end, focus should be on customer needs and to ensure a win-win situation for all stakeholders.

These are some of our thoughts as we continue to work closely with our clients as their trusted advisor. Any pointed feedback is always welcome; as it would help us further improve our processes.

*This article was also featured in ‘SoftwareTest Professional’ Magazine’s January Newsletter, a leading industry magazine focused towards Testing Professionals. Seth Eliot, a thought-leader in the testing community and a Senior Knowledge Engineer, Test Excellence, at Microsoft, took personal interest in the article as well.

Below is an infographic from Online Marketing Trends. It illustrates the rapid adoption of tablets. From 16.1 million shipped in 2010, market researchers predict there will be 147.2 million tablets shipped in 2015. Currently iOS is leading the charge with about 61% of the market with Android in a distant second holding 30%. In 2012, we can expect to see that level out as Android and Microsoft start to whittle away Apple’s dominant position.

The usage breakdown is also very interesting. You can see the consumer is primarily using tablets for gaming; whereas, not surprisingly business users are more focused on browsing, email, and working remotely. Regarding popular apps, you can see Citrix is a leader as it enables users to log into their enterprise environments remotely and run Windows applications on their iPads. Although the user experience isn’t very smooth yet, vendors are starting to take notice and plan for ways to make their applications more mobile friendly.

Tablets are finding their way into the work place.

Involve SMEs when gathering requirements. They know what they need!

In most report writing projects, the biggest challenge as a consultant is to quickly gain an understanding of the client’s data. A consultant needs to get a good grasp of all systems and business logic at the requirements gathering stage before embarking on report development.

It is useful working with the company’s IT department, especially in terms of understanding the use and impact of the chosen technologies/applications on the project. However, a consultant also needs to understand the business itself, which includes gathering knowledge on the company’s business model and its success drivers, KPIs, and how the report’s data will be used in monitoring and controlling these drivers.  This is very important in order to ensure that the requirements are complete and make sense, both from a technical and business perspective.

It can be challenging to gain a deep understanding of these factors if the sources of information are limited to the IT department. Meetings with subject matter experts is required to achieve depth and breadth of knowledge. Some clients do provide schema diagrams and a few sample queries, but the success of a BI engagement demands much more.

The consultant needs to make a concerted effort to find the people that know the data. These people may or may not be included in the BI project but their knowledge on how to pull the data and analyze it can be invaluable to the BI initiative. A consultant should make sure that these key players are an elemental part of the requirements gathering and testing process. These individuals can usually determine very quickly if the data is correct, reducing time wasted. Having them available as a resource throughout a BI project can not only make the requirements gathering and development process easier, it can help ensure that the data is accurate and used properly to allow for optimal business analysis.

Here are some of the key areas which these individuals can help with include:

• Generalizing specific information obtained for a single report, which enables the consultant to anticipate future requests and be flexible in meeting client needs in the future. The knowledgeable individuals can help to define clear and clean criteria.
• Refining specifications that are incomplete or open-ended, taking into consideration both technical and business perspectives, to reduce redundancies and repetition.
• Reconciling the “logic-based” mindset of a programmer with the “business-based” perspective of the user. This may lead to illogical requests that generate no data.
• Codifying generalized user requests. It is a good idea to have the user create a request in a single sentence, in the form of an actual question the report will provide the answer to. This will reduce wasted effort and allow the consultant to deliver the report in the most concise, comprehensive, and efficient format.

We are helping our clients with their report development and business analytics projects. To learn more about the report development process, connect with us. We are happy to provide free consultations.

Lessons from a HP Partner in Vancouver

Before I delve in, let us first take a deep breath and appreciate the implications of Testing in our daily lives! A 30 second Ikea commercial nicely summarizes the importance of quality.

QTP is a tool for automating functional and regression tests. QC works as a quality management platform that offers requirements management, test management, defects management, and business process testing. Together they are a powerful force which significantly facilitates functional test automation.

These are award winning products, now an integral part of the multi-billion dollar HP Software Portfolio.

This is a 2-part series. In this article, Part 1, I am going to focus on QTP and describe some best practices to automate functional tests. In Part 2, I will shift my focus to the functionality of QC.

I’m currently involved in a large automation project. These are our views based on our project experience.

Part 1: QTP

Steps & Guidelines

1. Obtain knowledge and define test scope

Step 1 is to get familiar with the application under test, test environment and manual test steps. We should consider the following areas when we acquire the knowledge of the test: test purpose, test environment, applications required, test verification, and unexpected behaviours.

With the knowledge to understand and execute the test, we will have enough information for automating the test and defining the test scope.

2. Write manual test steps

Even though the test is automated and manual testing becomes a very rare case, it is good to have clear and precise manual test steps for reference. When we write the test steps, we should assume the readers have very limited knowledge and experience of executing this test. Therefore, the steps should be very specific and detailed. For example, pressing TAB may not be documented sometimes because it seems too tedious, but it may be a very critical step to the test.

3. Divide the test steps into components

A test may consist of 20-30 test steps and require multiple applications. Since some test steps are used in lots of test cases, grouping test steps into components can exploit the reusability of the test steps. There is no strict rule for dividing the test steps into components, but each component should serve one purpose and can be reused as a standalone component in lots of tests.

4. Write test script for each business process test (BPT)

After the test steps are grouped in several business components, we can start developing test scripts.

Here are some steps for developing a script:

i. Create a shared object repository:

The object repository contains the objects used in the test. This repository can be built by simply recording the steps with QTP or using QTP Object Spy. After the objects are added to the repository, we can save this repository in the QC server, and this repository can be used among different tests.

ii. Create an application area:

Every BPT test script is associated with one application area, so we need to create a new application area with the required add-ins, an object repository, functional libraries, and recovery scenarios. The test script inherits these settings from the application area. An application area can be used by different tests, but a test can select only one application area.

iii. Develop the test script:

QTP allows users to write the test script in keyword view or expert view. If complicated logic is involved (such as if-else, while loop, randomization, etc), keyword view is not able to provide such support.

Developing the test script includes:

• Record a simple test flow: Recording the test steps with QTP is a good starting point; in fact, do not bother too much about handling special cases, adding verifications, and so on at this stage. This phrase can identify any problems or issues with running the application with QTP. In some cases, QTP does have problems with launching and running some applications. After we know of these problems, we have to first tackle these blockers by coming up with some workarounds.

• Add verification: There are two ways to verify data; we can either use a QTP checkpoint or use a customized checkpoint. QTP provides 8 types of checkpoints, but sometimes creating checkpoints for parameterized data is not straightforward. On the contrary, a customized checkpoint provides the flexibility to verify in different situations. Here is an example of creating a customized checkpoint:

If <Condition> Then

Reporter.ReportEvent micFail, “Login”, “Username is invalid.”

End If

• Implement logic: Recording the test steps does not generate the important logics behind the scene; therefore, we have to implement some logics for the test by ourselves. The logic can help handling special scenarios, generating test data, verifying complicated elements, and so on.

• Parameterize variables: In most cases, we have to parameterize variables so that the test script can be generic and accept different data. Parameterization using QC and QTP is straightforward.

5. Combine components into flows and a test

After the test scripts of the business components are complete, we can combine them into flows and/or a test in QC.

In Part 2, I’ll delve into QC and eventually tie-up all the pieces together to expand on how the combination of QC & QTP fits into the overall strategy.

For more details, please feel to connect with me at Maggie.yu@optimusinfo.com

Using Report Building to create reports for SSRS.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Report Builder 3.0 is a report creation tool developed by Microsoft. I have only recently started using Report Builder, but have been pleasantly surprised on how quickly I could pick up some of the more advanced features. In this post I will discuss the application’s functionalities that I have found useful and the pros and cons of using Report Builder.

First off, I will give you a brief overview of the different features in the Report Builder workspace. After creating a new report your workspace will look similar to the image above. The first step in creating a report is to add a data source. You can add a data source by right clicking on Data Sources then opening ‘Add Data Source’ in the Report Data section. Selection 1 in the above image shows the Data Source section.

In Report Builder there are shared and embedded data sources.  I strongly recommend to always use shared data sources. Shared data sources can be used by multiple reports; whereas, embedded data sources have the database name and credentials stored in the report. If you need to rename a database or change credentials, using a shared data source you can update it for all reports at once.

After creating your data source you need to create a dataset. sYou do this by right clicking on Data Sets and then selecting ‘Add Data Set’.  Selection 2 in the figure above shows the data set selection. You then complete the wizard and select the data from the data source you want to use in your data set.

After configuring your data source and data set, you can present your data by using one of the data visualization or data regions wizards. Report Builder 3.0 uses the same familiar ribbon interface used by Microsoft Office. The Insert tab of the ribbon interface contains all the different data wizards you can use to group and visualize your data.  Selection 3 in the figure above shows the three basic data regions:

1. Table Wizard helps you display data in a row and column format. A table only grows vertically downward.
2. Matrix Wizard helps you display data in a column/row format just like a table, but a matrix can grow both vertically and horizontally.
3. List Wizard helps you display data in a list.  Unlike the matrix and table wizard, a List supports a free-layout that can include multiple tables or matrices vertically ordered.

After selecting one of the wizards, you are asked to select the data set you wish to use. After which you can drag and drop the different columns of your data set into the wizard. Once you complete the wizard, a table will appear in the workspace with reference to the dataset you have selected. Even though the wizards provide an easy mechanism to present information, they don’t provide me with the necessary customization and control I require. So instead of using a wizard, I prefer to insert a table and populate the fields manually by dragging columns from my dataset into the cells of my table.

Report Builder allows you to directly modify the SQL queries of data sets. This is especially useful when you already have created the necessary query and you just need to plug it into the query designer to retrieve the required tables and columns from your data source.  You can then drag and drop the query results into your table.

Sometimes you have cases in which your report requires the user to input certain parameters before generating the report. You can create those parameters by right clicking on ‘Parameters’ and selecting ‘Add Parameters’. As shown in selection 4 of the above image. Another better method of doing this is to edit the SQL query directly and adding ‘@variable’ to the query where needed. Report Builder automatically detects this and creates a parameter entry for it, you can then use in the report.

Another useful feature of Report Builder is the right hand properties pane. Selection 5 shows the property pane. You can enable this pane by going to the View tab in the ribbons interface and checking the properties check box. The properties pane has saved me a lot of time when authoring reports. This is because it allows me to edit all properties of an object selected directly, instead of right clicking and going through the properties dialogue window.

I will end this blog post by pointing out some of the pros and cons of Report Builder that I have come across while authoring reports:

1. One major positive feature of Report Builder 3.0 in my opinion is the ability to have shared data sources and data sets. This feature drastically saves time and allows multiple reports to share the same data. For example, create shared data sets for all parameters that will be used in multiple reports.
2. A second major positive feature of Report Builder 3.0 in my opinion is the ability to edit and modify the SQL of any data set. This allows for superior control and more advanced data collection.
3. One drawback of Report Builder 3.0 is how Microsoft implements the Query Editor. The query editor makes it difficult to debug your custom SQL query since it automatically rolls back to the last working query when it encounters an error in the current query. Due to the Query Editor doing this you can’t go back and try to fix the current SQL error without retyping it. To avoid this issue, use SQL Management Studio to write your initial queries.

How can you deploy an application to all these devices?

Looking to build a mobile application for your company but not sure where to start? Have you considered doing it in small phases using open source technologies? This approach will enable you to make a relatively smaller investment upfront and get a solid, usable proof of concept together before making a serious investment of time and money.

When planning a mobile strategy, you can get overwhelmed with the choices. Do we focus on smartphones or tablets? Do we build an iPhone app or a mobile website? What about all of our BlackBerry users?

Where to start?

Nowadays I would recommend a phased approach. Start with a lightweight mobile website built using open web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. That application can have full graphics, videos, forms, and be very dynamic. Plus, it can be designed in a flexible manner that will work well on a very wide range of devices.

Mobile web applications are just like websites that have been designed to fit and work well on small screens. They can even maintain limited functionality while the user is offline.

From that stage you can start to monitor the application’s usage and benefit to the company. Are users finding the information they need? Are they making purchases? Are leads being generated? If the answer is yes, then take the next step and start porting the web application to become native applications.

Why build a native application?

If your mobile web application is proving to be valuable, consider building a native application that can be deployed to specific application stores, such as the Apple App store and the Android Marketplace. The benefits of native applications are two-fold: native applications have improved functionality and arguably better marketing potential.

Once you develop native applications, you can begin to use more of the device’s functionality. You can start taking pictures, use more offline storage, benefit from the marketing opportunities and make a very natural user experience.

However, with the increased functionality of a native application comes a price, you need to develop in the native language. That can be a major investment of effort especially if you want your application to work on multiple devices.

How to build native applications WITHOUT learning 7 new programming languages?

Want to deploy your application to all the most popular browsers without having to learn a bevy of new languages? Consider the open source solution PhoneGap. It enables developers to write their applications using a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. From there developers can access native elements through PhoneGap’s APIs and then deploy to all leading devices.

PhoneGap isn’t a silver bullet as there is still a challenge to make a single code-base work perfectly on all devices, but a recommended approach is to build a perfect app for one device, then patch that app to work on another device, without affecting the first deployment. For example, build an iOS application, then adjust it so it works on an Android but make sure it still works properly on iOS. Using this method, you don’t need to become a master at both Objective C and Java, you can leverage open web technologies. From this point you can attack one more platform at a time until you reach all 7 that PhoneGap currently supports.

To learn more about mobile application development, connect with us. We are happy to provide free consultations.

Gartner's business intelligence predictions for 2012

As 2012 is next door, Gartner has identified next year’s trends. From the list, I find the following the most fascinating.

Next-Generation Analytics: As we know profitability at any organization is the result of limitless “minor” actions taken by decision makers at the front lines — at employees’ desks, in front of customers, with partners etc. But, because traditional business intelligence solutions are best suited to delivering historical, narrowly-focused information, most companies are unable to arbitrate and respond to business changes in real time.

The enabler of micro- and macroscopic views of profitability is analytics: sets of interactive objects (i.e., graphs, tables, reports, alerts) which support the process of taking profitable actions by helping the decision maker separate truly actionable knowledge from raw data. Therefore, analytics can help link both insight and action. In order to do this properly, these must be available when profit occurs, through collaboration, at the point of opportunity, by many people, and in incremental actions.

Analytics is growing along three key dimensions:

1. From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. This has been the focus for many efforts in the past and will continue to be an important focus for analytics.
2. From analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing real-time as well as historical data from multiple systems in order to simulate and predict the future.
3. Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension:
   1. from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions
   2. from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (txt, audio etc) – best example in this category would be Apple’s new TV that will have SIRI to help viewers decide which channels to watch based on their mood.

Additionally, analytics is also beginning to shift to the cloud which enables high performance and grid computing. As we have seen this year, I have a strong belief that in 2012, analytics will increasingly focus on decisions and collaboration. It will provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.

Big Data: The overwhelming size of data is exponentially increasing day by day. Along with the size, complexity of formats and delivery speed has also exceeded the capabilities of traditional data management technologies. These significant changes have increased the need for new, simple technologies to manage the volume of data. Currently in the market we find many new emerging technologies, with the potential to be disruptive (e.g., in-memory DBMS). Analytics has become a major driving application for data warehousing, with the use of self-service data marts and cubes. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bring together information from multiple sources as needed and will replace the single data warehouse model soon.

Cloud Computing: Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and throughout 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. As companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce continue to expand their cloud offerings users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012.

Rupmeet works with Optimus in the area of Business Analytics. Please feel free to contact us to setup a brief introductory meeting.