Indicee Releases

Detailed control over date filtering

In our Holiday release we added support for adding filtering widgets right on our dashboards. The most common use of this is for filtering all of the reports on the dashboard to a common time period. We shouldn’t have been surprised how quickly customers jumped on this. Due to popular demand, we’ve updated our date picker widget to allow virtually any date ranges you can think of. Relative dates (last 3 months, last quarter), specific date ranges by quarters, years or days.

Isn’t Cloud BI great! Instead of waiting a year for the next product release to ship, customers get what they want in weeks.

Don’t need the manual anymore!

Indicee is one of the few Cloud BI apps with very fine grained control over user roles and permission. All these attributes are documented and can be set online using our administration interface. However, the list is quite long and in the past the administrator had to look up the correct attribute, enter it without error. Not up to our UI standards.

An upgrade to our administration interface makes it much easier to find common attributes that customers might want to change or customize for their purposes. This includes attributes from common look and feel items to user specific timezone settings.

Parameters to drive all dashboard widgets

This could be a release on it’s own. Our most powerful feature this time around, it turns dashboards from static snapshots of data into completely dynamic views that users can filter across all the widgets.

Most dashboarding apps put a simple, generic date parameter on the dashboard allowing them to serve many time periods. This feature was requested by so many of our customers, we wanted to get it right. We decided to give dashboard designers the power to decide how many and what type of parameters they need. So, dashboards can have an assortment of filters that turn them into powerful decision making tools.The sky’s the limit now with Indicee dashboards.

New Gauge and Headline Visualizations

Our release theme of better dashboarding continues with two new ways of presenting key performance metric information. Single values can now be presented using a Gauge widget or a Headline widget providing a bold way to display important metrics.

Both widgets have styling options to color code performance bands indicating where the current value falls within expectations.

Report Titles and more styling control

Just like charts, tabular reports can now have titles and subtitles for greater clarity. As with most of our descriptive elements, the titles can take advantage of substitution variables which are great for embedding things like report creation dates, update times or even applied filter values right into the title.

We’ve also added additional styling options for tabular reports to control fonts and background colors for headings and cells. The transparent option is great for having dashboard backgrounds show through.

Dashboard scrolling

Dashboard designers will appreciate the new option for specifying a fixed size for the dashboard.

This is great for larger dashboards where the designer wants to have the user scroll through a variety of widgets instead of having them re-sized to fit the browser window.

 

Zoom in or Expand in place

Indicee has had the ability to expand reports for quite some time. Now, report viewers have the option of specifying the drill-in-place (“expand”) or drill-and-replace(“zoom-in”) options.Drill-and-replace is a great option for larger tabular reports that become unweildy as users expand them. When drilling, the report is replaced with only the “drilled” data.

Drilling like this also works on Indicee charts.Drill-in-place works well on smaller tabular reports where “expanding” the report results in a table that is still easy to consume.

Our question panel is what got us started. The ability for business users to build their own queries using a Question type interface is always the highlight of our demos.

Now we’ve made it even easier to use, especially for bigger data sets. Lots of ways to manage longer lists of measures, grouping clauses and filters.

Find what you need faster with new question measure pickers

We’ve replaced the simple drop-down menu for picking question clause measures with a picker dialog. This is great news for report designers or ad-hoc query users to help them quickly search and filter based on measure names, favorites and tags.

Trying out different question clauses is much faster now with drag and drop re-ordering of clauses and filters.

Free report creators from locked down formatting rules

The new measure picker serves double duty as a great way to override formatting logic that was applied at the modeling stage. Choose different date or number formats, different aggregation rules that apply to only this report.

Need more? Add a completely new reporting measure from the report editor without having to go back into the modeling interface. A great way to speed up report building.

More flexible filtering options

The new picker also provides some new flexibility in selecting filters. Instead of selecting from the predefined list of values, the report designer can enter their own list directly. Dates can now be selected from a new calendar control to make this faster and easier.

If we know one thing about running a BI service it’s that the amount of data never shrinks. As customers throw more and more data at Indicee we always work to ensure we’re ahead of the performance curve with constant improvements to our SPRITE data engine. With this release we’ve released a new caching mechanism that will mean repeated reporting on the same values will get faster and faster. This is especially visible to users that are using the Question panel for ad-hoc analysis.

Also added is a new progress indicator on all the Indicee reports providing better feedback related to report running times.