We’ve all heard the industry call: “Let’s get BI on every desktop.” Managers everywhere have been transfixed on putting more relevant data in the hands of information workers because they know that the right facts and data empower users to make impactful decisions with positive results. To do this, they must have access to analytical tools to interact with data in a more meaningful way.

As the first phase of bringing BI to the masses, canned reports with data extracted from line-of-business systems have had some success. Today’s information worker uses reports to create a snapshot of aggregated data that gives them the initial information to do their jobs correctly.

Sadly, many businesses never realize the full potential of the rich data collected by business intelligence software, for the simple reason that a typical user can’t make heads or tails of it. If more BI vendors realized this, the whole concept of business intelligence wouldn’t have come under so much scrutiny over the years.

Microsoft is pulling through in the clutch. MS Office is one of the most widely used tools in the world and enables users to perform analysis and generate key insights for their businesses. Microsoft has taken an open approach, allowing third-party contributors to extend and build on top of the Office platform, taking the innovation to the next level.

Panorama Software has been working with Microsoft since 1996, when Microsoft acquired its OLAP technology to eventually become the foundation for SQL Server Analysis services. Since then, Panorama has made it its goal to bring BI to the masses by taking the best of Microsoft and combining it with the best of Panorama’s own flagship product – NovaView.

NovaView functions with a unique user interface that integrates as a set of web parts inside of Microsoft SharePoint. Most BI solutions rely on the skill sets of their users to explore features and functions and learn how to manipulate analytical tools. Where NovaView differs is its intuitiveness in guiding users through the process of data analysis.

Consider pivot tables. They’re extremely powerful when it comes to letting users slice, dice, filter and sort data—but users need to know what it is they can and want to do to make that data analysis meaningful. NovaView guides users through the different options they have to truly make reports useful. This is accomplished with flash: NovaView makes relevant functionalities blink, flash and pop in a context-sensitive way. Instant picks provided by the software suite can help generate further insights.

Sometimes the most difficult part of BI is creating that initial report; NovaView helps relieve some of this stress by applying an “I’m feeling lucky” concept that intelligently creates that initial report. Once they’ve got that first one out of the way, workers are free to customize subsequent reports based on what is and isn’t useful.

Bringing the two platforms together offers information workers enough simplicity for them to adopt the concept of data analysis. At the same time, the combination extends to give more BI power to power users and enable enterprise companies to deploy an end-to-end BI solution for the organization.

Everything Panorama does is based on Microsoft Office, SQL and SharePoint platforms. Our ultimate goal is to extend the use of these great products and truly bring BI to the masses in a comprehensive and accessible way — and that’s exactly what NovaView does.

For more information on Panorama’s complete end-to-end BI solution for the Microsoft platform, please visit www.panorama.com.

Non Empty Behavior is a very good optimization method you can use with your calculated measures. It allows you to define a list of measures that their emptiness defines the emptiness of your calculated measure. To understand this, look at the picture (taken from the MSDN):

This is the calculation expressions pane from the Calculations tab in the cube designer. From MSDN:

“The measures you specify in the Non-empty behavior list are used to resolve NON EMPTY queries in MDX. When you specify one or more measures in the Non-empty behavior list, Analysis Services treats the calculated member as empty if all the specified measures are empty. If the Non-empty behavior property is blank, Analysis Services must evaluate the calculated member itself to determine whether the member is empty.”

This is not new. NEB is quite old feature in SSAS. The new thing (at least for me) is that NEB can also be used in Panorama formulas! For example, M1+M2 /*NONEMPTY_BEHAVIOR={M1,M2}*/ will apply M1 & M2 as NEB. You can see more Panorama optimization methods here. Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://www.panorama.com/blog/2010/03/non-empty-behavior-in-panorama/feed/ 0 http://www.panorama.com/blog/2010/03/text-in-measures/ http://www.panorama.com/blog/2010/03/text-in-measures/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:26:49 +0000 Miky Schreiber http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=361 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:

Create Member CurrentCube.[Measures].[Completed Percentage] as
IIF(IsEmpty([Measures].[Tasks To Do]),
null,
IIF([Measures].[Tasks To Do] = 0),
-1,
[Measures].[Completed Tasks] / [Measures].[Tasks To Do]
)
)
,format_string = “#,##0%;\T\h\e\r\e\ \a\r\e\ \n\o\ \t\a\s\k\s;0%”;

In the Panorama’s view, the format of the measure must be “General”. Otherwise, the view won’t show the format string with the text

Last month I posted an interview with Rony Ross about being a successful woman in technology. Aside from this, we also discussed in depth the business intelligence software company that she founded, Panorama Software, including its growth over the years, business intelligence (BI) trends and what we can expect from Panorama this year. Here is that part of our discussion.

Panorama Software was founded in 1993 and moved its headquarters to North America in 2003, what factors went into the decision to move the headquarters?

In 2002, Panorama realized that the marketplace for its products is growing and decided to become a global company. We decided we needed a North American presence, including sales, marketing, support, finance and product management and that moving the headquarters to North America was a logical step.

We evaluated various locations, and were determined to concentrate on locations that had daily direct flights to Israel. One of Panorama’s directors suggested Toronto, Canada. It was deemed a great choice, both for the favorable (at the time) value of the Canadian Dollar vs. the US dollar, as well as having daily direct flights to Israel.

What steps did the move entail?

A few people relocated to Toronto, including myself and Eynav Azarya who has since become Panorama’s CEO. We recruited quite a lot of people in Toronto, as well as in various locations in the US. We moved our finance operations, as well as our Marketing, Product Management and parts of our Worldwide support.

What are some of the BI trends that we can expect to see in 2010?

I believe that in 2010 we shall see Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BI picking up and becoming an option of choice for many organizations as a way to extend their BI deployment within and outside the firewall. Many organizations will adopt a hybrid strategy, where they will be running applications on the cloud while maintaining full control and ownership of data on-premise.

What can we expect to see from Panorama Software in 2010?

Panorama will deliver great BI solutions that are based on Microsoft Office, SQL and SharePoint platforms. Our goal for 2010 is to extend the use of these great products, while providing an even better end user experience and enabling enterprise companies to deploy an end-to-end BI solution for the organization. We will also release a new version of our SaaS BI module.

The recent tightening in partnership between Microsoft and Panorama Software bodes well for those companies wanting to complete their BI offerings with the delivery of a fast, powerful BI front-end.

“The combination of Panorama and Microsoft BI provides users with a powerful, end-to-end BI offering delivering rapid insight and allowing for speedy decision making,” says Anton Jacobsz, sales executive at Datacentrix.

As a ProfitBase Authorised Reseller, Datacentrix maintains that Panorama’s NovaView suite of proactive BI solutions opens a new world for local users of ProfitBase 2009, a scalable, rapidly configured, graphical, data warehouse and OLAP Cube deployment accelerator for Microsoft SQL Server.

Jacobsz says that, following the recent release of Panorama’s NovaView 6 and the technical preview announcement of Office 2010, together, Panorama and Microsoft have extended BI to even more users across the globe. NovaView 6.0 combines numerous features, from query and analysis, formatted reporting, performance dashboard and KPI scorecards, to modeling, advanced visualisation and automated report distribution. Not only does it boast an even more robust platform designed to bring more users to BI, but also new deployment wizards and applications to make it Panorama’s biggest release at this point.

“Panorama NovaView is 100 percent dependent on the Microsoft platform and integrates with the Microsoft tools and platforms available today,” Jacobsz explains. “In fact, it is safe to say that Panorama combines the best of a dedicated BI suite with the finest of Microsoft’s BI platform and productivity software.”

Panorama and Microsoft have enjoyed a lengthy history together, which kicked off with Microsoft’s acquisition of Panorama’s OLAP technology in the 1990s, becoming the foundation for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis services.

In 2005, the business intelligence department at Cascades Tissue Group (a division of Quebec-based Cascades) was looking for a more dynamic BI solution for reporting and analysis, one that could potentially reduce inventory levels, more easily develop custom reports and improve efficiency and profitability in certain areas. Since that year, Panorama NovaView has done just that for the manufacturer. About 70 inventory, sales and supply chain/production managers and customer service reps leverage NovaView for a more connected and educational analysis experience.

Starting with a Cognos application and moving to an Excel add-on app for browsing OLAP cubes from SQL, the group needed to add functionality for end users—allowing them to create and modify reports without specialized analytical skills. With NovaView, training only took a few hours, and reports only take half as much time to create or tweak.

Sales and inventory staffers can perform custom analysis by creating their own Excel or PDF reports via NovaView’s web-based platform if standard reports don’t offer enough information. “The software is like using a pivot table in Excel,” said Jocelyn Laberge, a veteran in Cascades’ BI department. “You just drag and drop fields into the grid and right-click to make selections.”

NovaView offers Cascades visibility, replacing the department’s silo-by-silo operations with a comprehensive, comparable view of data like inventory and backorder levels and warehouse capacity—facilitating collaboration that helped lower inventory by as much as 20 percent. The increased efficiency offered by a shipping pattern cube developed in SQL and connected to NovaView optimizes the delivery activities and cuts shipping costs of product and raw material carriers.

An overall equipment efficiency (OEE) initiative for improving overall activity is heavily based on data collected by Novaview, and the company is getting more accurate numbers on profitability. Overall, Cascades is working to improve efficiency across all aspects of their business with the help of NovaView and succeeding.

Join Microsoft and Panorama teams as we discuss an end-to-end BI solution that brings together the best of SQL, Office and SharePoint with Panorama NovaView suite, enabling users to perform even deeper analysis in a web environment.

We will also demonstrate tight integration with PowerPivot (Microsoft’s new in-memory engine) that enables users to perform even more sophisticated analysis, build interactive reports or create executive dashboards – all sourcing natively from PowerPivot.

This webcast will showcase how you can:

- Leverage your existing investment in SQL, Office and SharePoint in all their versions
- Give analysts powerful tools to find hidden insights
- Make BI simpler for business users
- Create interactive reports on top of any data: OLAP, in-memory (PowerPivot), relational and Spreadsheets

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/421096121

“When we launched our first product release out of Israel in March 1995, developers coming out of the Israeli army were turning the location into a hotbed for IT creativity and innovation,” said Rony Ross, founder and chairperson of Panorama Software. “Since then, we’ve helped launch the first web-deployed, cloud-enabled and now fully hybrid business intelligence platforms in the industry.”

The first generation product helped companies deploy a smart, optimized multi-dimensional database to handle the huge amounts of data they were accumulating in their corporate databases, making the data available for analysis in a friendly and easy to use EIS (Executive Information System) environment. In October 1996, Microsoft acquired the Panorama OLAP technology, which was further developed and rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated into the SQL Server platform.

But Microsoft wasn’t done with Panorama. After it purchased the technology, the software giant encouraged Panorama to develop client-side applications to run on top of Microsoft technologies. A unified client-side product (Panorama NovaView) that was simple to use emerged from the partnership, accommodating development and deployment under the same user interface.

A third generation product appeared a couple of years later. NovaView Web Intelligence Server enabled powerful, highly functional analytics on top of the MS SQL Server Analysis Services – as well the first web-based deployments using thin client architecture.

NovaView version 4 built on previous versions with NovaView Smart Reporting; a completely different look at interactive reporting that creates, formats and distributes high quality reports in just one click.

NovaView Spotlight emerged from next-generation development. Spotlight delivers personalized insights to users in a simple and intuitive way, and puts these insights right when and where they need it – in Microsoft Outlook.

NovaView version 6 saw the dawn of the first consumer-oriented BI in the cloud. Based on Google Apps, the analytics gadget allows information workers to come up with analytics on the fly and in the cloud on top of any spreadsheet; generate a multidimensional model automatically, intuitively and in record time; and use analytics in the cloud through self-discoverable functionality that does not require any training. Hundreds of thousands of users still leverage the platform today.

NovaView’s recent and most exciting incarnation offers total hybrid functionality with painless implementation and without having to duplicate the data by setting up a whole datawarehouse in the cloud. With a hybrid solution, information stays on-premise where it’s safe and directly accessible, while the application layer that collects the data resides in the cloud. This kind of functionality allows for full, secure control of data, coupled with the cost-saving benefits of cloud computing.

“After fifteen years and numerous incarnations, Panorama NovaView continues to stand as a cornerstone of progress and evolution in the business intelligence community,” added Ross.

Panorama Software has recently formed a strategic alliance with the RSC Group. By integrating our solutions, you can now extend your Dynamics solutions to drive Corporate Performance Measurement with a true pervasive BI suite, leveraging Panorama & Microsoft technologies you already own.

Join us for this highly informative webinar to see an end to end business intelligence solution that brings together the best of Dynamics, Office and SharePoint with Panorama NovaView suite to solve the needs of the most demanding organizations.

This webinar will showcase how you can:
• Discover new ways to take further advantage of your existing investment in Microsoft Dynamics
• Make BI simpler for end users and analysts
• Extend the reach of existing reports to more information workers
• Create interactive reports on top of any data (OLAP, relational and spreadsheets)
• Share and collaborate inside and outside your corporate firewall

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/296895769

I recently had the opportunity to interview Rony Ross, the founder and current chairwoman of Panorama Software, a business intelligence software company. Ross was born and raised in Israel and overcame challenges as a female entrepreneur to grow Panorama into the successful company that it is today.

Read the full interview at Women in Technology: Rony Ross, Panorama Software (Interview)