Panorama Business Intelligence

I knew for a long time that measures can have text and not only numbers, but last week I had a scenario where it was the perfect solution for my problem.

Let’s say that I work in number of jobs. In every job I got some tasks that I need to do. The fact table looks like this:

Summarizing the “Tasks To Do” column will get the total tasks that I need to do. Summarizing the “Tasks Completed” column will get the tasks that I did. Note that in the Therapist job I didn’t get any tasks.
In the OLAP cube, I created a calculated measure which is the percent of the completed tasks (for every job or for any other dimension). The problem is: What is the answer in case that there are no any tasks to do? Some will say 0% and some will say 100%. That’s why a text measure such as “There are no tasks” can be a perfect solution for this kind of problem. This is the calculation of the calculated measure:

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A wonderful idea I heard of is to turn to full screen mode in Internet Explorer when entering the Dashboard site. It can make a better user experience. Try it yourself and you’ll see the huge difference.

How will we do that? We will add a JavaScript code to the first page of the dashboards site and after that we’ll ask our system administrator to enable this script for us. Let’s get to work:

Step 1 – The JavaScript

Create a new HTML component in the dashboard page. Edit it and click on the “View Source” button (the one with the <>). Enter the following code:
<SCRIPT>
var wscript = new ActiveXObject(”Wscript.shell”);
wscript.SendKeys(”{F11}”);
</SCRIPT>

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A new desire came from one of our customers. The request was to have the ability to search in Panorama Crosstab. The first solution I thought of was searching the grid in iterative way and it worked fine using the Panorama SDK. After that, my friend Boris came with another simple and elegant solution: We can use Parameter in the Panorama view and highlight the number which was defined in the parameter. In this post I’ll explain how to implement this.

1. Create a new view using Panorama NovaView Desktop and make sure you see the grid in the view.

2. Define a new parameter: Click on View -> Paramaters, and click on the “Manage Parameters” button. Click on Add. The default type is Number and this is exactly what wee need (for now). In the name, type Highlight and in the Default Value type a number that you see in the grid (this is the number that will be highlighted later). Let’s take 0 for example. Click on OK twice and close the little Parameters window.
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Here are some tips we collected over the years about dashboard design:
Page Layout

• Less is more – don’t put too many views in the page.
• Rule of thumb – no more than five reports in one page.
• Don’t use scrolling – the average user won’t scroll down the screen.
• Position in screen – some researches made about this subject and here are the recommendations:
  • Top-Left – it’s the part of the screen that the user looks at first. Put there the most important data.
  • Center of the screen – the part the user looks after the top-left. Put there the second-most important data.
  • Top-Right, Bottom-Left – Neutral parts.
  • Bottom-Right – The user won’t pay attention to it, don’t put there important data.
• Fixed menus in every page.
• Small amount of navigation targets in every page. Too much navigation paths will cause confusion.
• Concentrate on the main page – in 90% of the cases the user will stay there.
• Add graphic components and highlight them if necessary.
• Blue color only to links (and underline, of course).

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I want to show you a work I finished few months ago. I’m very proud of this work as it will be in the desktop of our CEO and I got many compliments for it. Making this was possible thanks to the Panorama SDK.

There’s a problem getting out screenshots out of my company, so I did a sketch in Power Point. Note that what you see in the picture is not the real screenshot of the work (It’s much more beautiful in the reality…).

This is the functionality of the leds map (my design, if you have any comments):

• The leds map is simply a web site, meaning zero-footprint in the client’s computer. Some computers in my company has java compatibility problems, so I added a parameter you can send with the site’s URL which changes the applet’s java version (see more in the next post, which will be more technical).
• The leds map has to be small, about a quarter of the screen. That’s because it’s intended to be a part of the CEO’s desktop.
• When the map loads, a picture with a turning-around The Thinker statue is shown with a “Loading” message below (our CEO loves that statue…).
• After the map has been loaded, the user sees two axis with the leds in them. The two axis can represent any Meta-Measures you’d like: Short-Term Profit Vs. Long-Term Profit, Client’s Satisfaction Vs. Company’s Profit, etc. This is a point that many people have difficulty to understand, so I’ll give an example: The yellow led is in the top-right corner, so that says that the underlying measure is very important in both the meta-measures. Going on with the example, that says that this measure is very important for theClient’s Satisfaction and for the Company’s Profit. Note that the leds never move. Only their color changes.

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With Panorama SDK you can do cool stuff as I will show you in the future. Though, There are important things you must know before you start. A very common task is to change the shown view views. Note that:

If you load the view using the Parameter “Alias” with the full view path (ends with  “.xml”) you won’t be able to change the view later. Worse: The applet will not return an error. It will just won’t respond. So, if you want to enable the dynamic change of the view, in the “Alias” parameter only enter the name of the Briefing Book where the desired view is. Next, add another parameter named “FirstView” and there enter the relative path of the view, meaning that you’ll have to remove the name of the server and the briefing book’s name. Don’t forget to replace the back-slashes (\) in double-back-slashed (\\), otherwise… the applet won’t respond. Some examples:

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