Business(s) and their units send hundreds to thousands of emails out via report scheduling. Delivering the correct reports to the right person is mission critical for efficient business process. Currently, a recall email feature exists for incorrect emails sent within network, but the recipients are notified of the email recall. Verifying the report and person prior to distribution is critical prior to external distribution.

Today, many businesses use an internal developer to verify the email and Business Intelligence document content prior to distribution. Their process includes copying themselves on the email with the documents, randomly spot checking a few emails, then re-running the schedule post validation.

Aware of email and report verification challenges, InfoSol assisted their InfoBurst customers to leverage the report bursting solution by delivering documents to a shared drive for review, then disabling or enabling a delivery or simulate a delivery for content and person validation.

To improve efficiencies and the existing review process for email content and distribution, InfoSol is unveiling a new module for Email Content Validation in the InfoBurst Build 237.  The innovative module is activated through an opt-in feature within each burst. The burst creator nominates the group to approve or reject the content for critical burst deliveries prior to distribution.

The Email Content Validation module has three core objectives:

1. Enforcing Validation for any external emails and attachments
2. Verifying the correct recipients receive the appropriate files
3. Re-sending content to selected recipients without re-running the schedule or burst

 TECH TIP DETAILS:

This tech tip details the steps for Email Content Validation while bursting documents via InfoBurst.

After upgrading the InfoBurst server to InfoBurst Build 237, open any existing burst-> navigate to Burst Properties -> Email Options -> Select the check box “Defer email Deliveries for Validation”

Content Validation Settings:

1. “Group performing the Validation” – Assign a group of users who validate the Email Content for the burst
2. “Wait for Validation: ‘N’ Hours” – InfoBurst holds the email for ‘N’ hours before it automatically rejects the emails
3. “Delete Content after: ‘N’ Days” – The Content validation system holds the email documents for N Days in the system. This is the window for resending the documents.

After the burst is executed and the individual documents are created, InfoBurst holds the Send email process and executes the new Save Email and Send Review Email process.

The nominated group receives an email with a web link to review the message and content for every email recipient.

Example of a sample email from a burst with the Content Validation Setting:

The reviewer clicks on the link and approves or rejects the content prior to distributing the external email. InfoBurst sends the emails contingent upon approval by a user in the nominated reviewer group.

Administrators access the content review portal by using the link syntax below:

 <your-iB-servername>:8551/review

Additionally, InfoBurst allows the user to resend emails with attachments for selected recipients without re-running the burst. An activity log records the user’s activity in the nominated group.

If a burst displays a failure for selected recipients, InfoBurst’s Content Validation module allows you to quickly select the failures and resend only to the failed recipients. (See below) Select the Recipient List button in the To Review screen to execute this process.

The Content Validation module includes the capability to store backups of the emailed documents. InfoBurst, new content validation system, simplifies the content reviewer’s validation processes and diminishes the risk of distributing the wrong reports to the wrong person.

Tableau uses the concept of hyper extracts – a compressed snapshot of data stored on disk and loaded into memory when required to render a tableau visualization. Hyper extracts are very beneficial and even essential to Tableau users. To refresh an extract on a daily, weekly or monthly basis users can add the data source or workbook to a refresh schedule in Tableau Server. Tableau schedule refreshes are great for time based schedules, but what if the refresh schedule has to check for an ETL load completion, a database table trigger, or any other external event? There’s no solution within Tableau Server.

Did you know that InfoBurst Tab can be leveraged for event based scheduling of Tableau extracts?

Here’s how it can be done:

Step 1: Create an Event in InfoBurst Tab

There are three type of events that can be created in InfoBurst Tab:

1. An event can be based on the presence of a control file or a trigger file on a network share
2. An event can be based on the results of a database query such as an ETL Load check
3. An event can be based on an InfoBurst trigger such as one schedule triggering another schedule

Here is an example of a successful ETL Load check using a database query:

Step 2: Catalog the extract-based Tableau workbook and create a burst to deliver a PDF or CSV

The delivery for this burst is a dummy delivery. The main function of the burst is to refresh the underlying extract and the dashboard’s visualization.

Step3: Create an event-based schedule that refreshes the extract on Tableau Server

Add the burst to a schedule and add the ETL check event in the Frequency section.

You can go a step further by adding an InfoBurst action which will inform your Tableau user community when the extract refresh is complete.

The recent Dresner 2021 Wisdom of the Crowds survey for Self-Service Business Intelligence showed that self-service BI ranked 6^th in importance out of 44 topics.

Guess what Number 1 was?

Yup, Reporting was #1 on the list!

Ten years ago, the BI industry experts and vendors were trying to convince us that self-service BI was here already and pervasive throughout most organizations and that BI reporting was on its way out. Yet today BI reporting remains number 1 in importance and self-service BI has made it all the way to number 6.

So at IBIS 2021 last month, there was a fascinating discussion on the Future of data visualization, artificial intelligence and machine learning in Business Intelligence with two BI visionaries from Tableau, Santi Becerra and Caroline Sherman.  There was a lot of great information and insights but the takeaway that stood out the most for me was when I asked them both where they saw the future of BI going in the next 5 years.

Santi said he envisioned a future where “Bite-size chunks” of critical BI data would be delivered real-time to people’s mobile devices. He did not think people would consume BI dashboards and perform slice-and-dice or complex drill-down functions on their phones. Instead, he felt that small important pieces of event-driven actionable information from Business Intelligence analysis and reports would be sent to people’s phones so they could consume and take action in seconds. Caroline agreed with this prediction making it all the more exciting for me.

Part of the reason I was so excited was that I have been working with many organizations over the last few years to help them do exactly what Santi and Caroline are predicting is the future of BI. Our addon BI solution, InfoBurst, provides a powerful platform for the automated scheduling, bursting, grouping, distributing and publishing of BI content to any destination in any commodity format. This, of course, includes “bite-size” pieces of BI analysis and reporting delivered to mobile devices.

One organization presenting at IBIS showed how they were using InfoBurst to automatically send text messages to people when critical drug shipments were delivered or delayed. This may appear to be more operational than BI in nature but the reports that were triggering these text messages was a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report analyzing thousands of shipments.

Another example from a few years ago was a healthcare company that wanted to send a weekly summary of patient billable services to each of the doctors performing the services. The doctors did not want to be sent an attachment or a link to click on, but just a simple summary sent inside the body of the email itself – a bite-size chunk of information they could consume in seconds!

To these recipients of actionable pieces of information, this is self-service BI.  In many organizations, there are people who are going to sit down and do “true” self-service data discovery and visualization, but for the time being, they remain the minority compared to the number of people in organizations that need bite sized data.

As Dresner’s 2021 survey clearly shows, BI reporting remains dominant and now people want the information in those reports intelligently analyzed, condensed, and delivered to them on their phones so they can consume and take action. The future of BI is here already.

While on a recent trip to Egypt, I noticed some wall paintings in several of the tombs I visited showing a person sitting in front of an offering table with what looked like a bunch of thin, vertical oblong objects, tapered at the top, and tightly packed together. I took a photo and showed it to my Archeologist friend who immediately told me it was sliced bread!

Now, there is no evidence that the Ancient Egyptians invented sliced bread (that accolade was given to Otto Frederick Rohwedder in 1928) but they did make, eat, and give offerings of a lot of bread, and Egyptologists have called this particular type, sliced bread.

Whoever created the phrase, “best thing since sliced bread”, it has prevailed in our English vocabulary since the 1930’s as an expression that refers to something that someone thinks is very good, original, and exciting, which is exactly why I want to blog about InfoBurst Squirrel.

The bread is Squirrel365 which is a low code/no code rapid application development tool that allows you to build visual web-based applications simply and quickly by dragging components on to a canvas, defining their properties and using a built-in spreadsheet to perform all the functions. You can build dashboards, value calculators and full-blown applications rapidly in just a few hours.

The bread slicer is InfoBurst Dash, which is a platform for providing connection options to data sources and scheduling, bursting and delivering that data to an application or its own in-memory data cache.

Combining Squirrel365 and InfoBurst Dash gives you a solution for integrating and improving performance/scalability of rapidly developed BI or operational applications with back-end data sources and deploying them in the cloud, on-premise, or even offline.

InfoBurst Squirrel has built in connectors to any ODBC data source, both read and write, so you can write back to databases.  It also has an in-memory cache connector and a query cache connector so that you could use SQL from Squirrel to only pull back specific data sets from the in-memory cache. This provides super-fast access to your data from Squirrel and tremendous scalability for supporting many users.

You can schedule queries, Excel or BusinessObjects to populate the in-memory cache based on time, event, or both, and set your own refresh frequency. The cache can contain millions of rows of data.

You can also just directly access the data from a database if you do not want to use the cache!

InfoBurst Squirrel also allows you to deliver offline Squirrel applications along with an offline data cache so that you could schedule external distributions and updates of your application without users needing to access your system. This requires a free downloadable data viewer that you will allow you to interact with the application on any Windows device.

InfoBurst Squirrel can complement any existing BI tool by providing a means to build a BI application with great performance, scalability, write back capability very fast and very inexpensively. Organizations like Salesforce, Honda, Bosch, Tenet Health, and the US Navy, to name a few, are reaping the benefits of it today. In fact, Salesforce expects to add over $1 billion to its ARR this year as a result of the InfoBurst Squirrel ROI Value Calculators they built and use.

So, obviously I think InfoBurst Squirrel is the best thing since sliced bread. I would love to know if you agree so I encourage you to check it out.

As we see in another new year, it’s that time to hear about all the new strategies from software and Business Intelligence( BI) vendors for 2024.

The last few years, it’s been dominated by Cloud and everyone wanting to be the number 1 in the cloud. But the last year has seen generative AI become the new hot item and no-code application development starting to pick up speed too like InfoBurst Squirrel.

So, I expect to see a slew of new strategies based around these areas for BI.

The thing about strategies is they are transient – they come and go but they don’t stick around too long. Nowhere is that more true than in the world of Business Intelligence.

SAP has changed it’s BI strategy many times in the last decade and I’m sure will continue to do so but if you look beyond the strategy there has been one constant that has remained solid – BusinessObjects.

This very clearly demonstrates that strategy has very little to do with the reality on the ground in most organizations.

Organizations move at their own pace and while BI vendors may point to new technologies and the future, they are more likely to consider cost and return on investment first.

Cloud is a great example where BI vendors promised cost savings that still, to this day, have never materialized.

Most BusinessObjects customers own perpetual licenses, so they only pay maintenance annually. Many have discovered that the cost of replacing BusinessObjects with any current Bi solution is astronomical and has no realistic return on investment.

However, that’s not the only reason organizations have stayed with BusinessObjects. Apart from having years of investment in the solution, it actually keeps the business running and gets the job done.

I mentioned in a previous blog The Future of Business Intelligence Reporting about how BusinessObjects was ,and still is ,used for operational reporting so you cannot just replace it with a cloud based BI tool that has inferior or no operational reporting capability.

As I have always done, I will be watching and working with organizations continuing to use and evolve their BusinessObjects deployments in 2024 rather than following the new BI strategies proposed by the BI vendors.

It’s not just the 10 year plus roadmap that BusinessObjects customers can hang their hat on, the next major release, BI 2025, promises to be groundbreaking in new functionality and capability.

The BusinessObjects community has a lot to look forward to in 2024, not least of which will be seeing previews of BI 2025.

And, of course, the best place to gather, see, talk and ingest everything BusinessObjects will be IBIS 2024 which will be held at the Ritz-Carlton, Dove Mountain from June 24 to 26 this year. The theme of this year’s event is Quantum Leap as we plan to showcase the quantum leap in terms of functionality coming with the new BusinessObjects while, at the same time highlight the quantum leaps that customers are making in their business using BusinessObjects in new and creative ways.

There will be 3 tracks this year with 45 sessions in total over the 3 days plus sensational keynotes and plenty of collaboration time. The 3 tracks are:

• BusinessObjects at its Best
• Creative Case Studies
• BI Strategy and Future Direction

If you are wondering about that last track being called BI Strategy and Future Direction, I can assure you that there will not be sessions on BI vendors strategies but rather on the actual strategies being pursued and employed by real customers.

The preliminary agenda is up, so be sure to check it out.

Get ready for a great year as BusinessObjects powers on.