Business Intelligence Portal

In WebFOCUS Release 8.2 Version 01M, you have access to the Collaborative Portal, a new type of portal that allows rearranging, reusing, and sharing content and pages between users more easily. The Collaborative Portal is characterized by the following features:

• Independent Pages and Portals. Portals and pages can be created independently under the Domains node in your WebFOCUS repository. You can rearrange the order and location of these items. Additionally, you can link and copy pages from the repository, which makes sharing content and updates instantaneous.
• Page Designer. A new tool that enables you to create stand-alone pages and store them in a repository folder of your choice.
• Page Templates. Functionality that allows you to select one of many pre-configured page layouts, and then populate it with your own content.
• Commenting and Collaboration. Developers and users of the Collaborative Portal can view, post, edit, and manage comments. Comments are available on several content levels, including pages and panels.

The ability to create collaborative portals is controlled in the Administrative Console. This feature is disabled by default. Once it is enabled, collaborative portals can coexist with portals that you create under the Portals node, adding a new level of flexibility to the content management.

In this release, you can take advantage of the improved drag-and-drop function, which allows you more flexibility in adding content to your page. Now, when you drag an item on the canvas, the drop target highlights the entire area, in which the content will be placed. Furthermore, you now have a choice to either replace a content item or add it as another tab. If you choose the latter, a tabbed container will be automatically created. Using this simple and intuitive action, you can build many complex layouts, for example, rows spanning columns can be accomplished by dragging content to a 25% top, bottom, or either side of the page. The drag-and-drop enhancement applies to all page layouts.

Another notable enhancement is the introduction of the Easy Selector container. You now have a choice to either enable Easy Selector on the columnar level or place it as a container on the page. You can even put Easy Selector inside the Responsive Container. This provides users and developers with more options in working with content. Also, if you place an empty plain panel on the canvas of a base page at design time and then save and run a portal, this panel automatically transforms into an Easy Selector container at run time.

Among other enhancements is the redesigned Remove Customizations function, which now includes new runtime menus on the page tab and under the User ID option in the Menu bar. Also, developers can now remove all customizations from a portal by using the Remove Customizations from All Users option in the Resources tree.

Furthermore, this release introduces several features that simplify working with containers. One of these enhancements is the tabbed Properties panel. It streamlines the way you interact with containers on the page canvas. Now, when you click any container element, the entire container is selected. You can modify specific aspects of the container by navigating to different tabs of the Properties panel. Additionally, you can now quickly change the type of the container at design time by clicking the Change Panel Type button, without losing any previous customizations. At run time, you can now change a title of a container, by right-clicking it and typing a new title.

The enhanced Samples Generator expands the ability to automatically generate a suite of analytic content based on existing single-segment Master Files in your repository. The Samples Generator is an instant introduction to reporting, demonstrating how any spreadsheet or Master File can become a basis for a set of compelling content to quickly help you visualize and analyze your data.

To generate new sample content from an existing Master File, right-click a domain or folder, point to New, and click Sample Content. After you select a Master File, the Samples Generator will populate your directory with sample charts, reports, and dashboards. Additionally, the suite will contain charts and reports that provide quick and easy navigation through the levels of each available hierarchy.

The sample content generated typically contains 15 to 40 items organized in subfolders, in the selected folder or domain. You can view, edit, or delete this content, as well as use it as a starting point to develop new content or dashboards.

The new percentage-based responsive design, introduced in this release, is a simple and flexible way to build a responsive portal. It works with your existing HTML and CSS, making your configuration fast and intuitive.

The key benefits of the percentage-based responsive design are:

• You can build any number of columns. Instead of having a fixed number of columns across your page, you can build any layout, with any number or combination of columns on the page.
• Percentage-based layouts scale to any width. Because the new responsive design uses percentages, the columns and margins will fit any width.
• Focus on the content. You no longer have to fit your content to the layout of your page. With the percentage-based responsive design, you can make your layout suit your content.
• Simplicity. We have built the Custom CSS Class field into the Portal Designer UI, so designing your percentage-based responsive layout can be done by simply typing the CSS class and viewing the changes in the real time.
• No math required. There are no elaborate calculations needed for creating a percentage-based responsive layout. All you need to count is the number of columns.

In addition to the responsive columnar layouts, you can incorporate responsive filter panels, created in App Studio, and turn any page into a compelling and functional dashboard.

External CSS Theme support is an advanced feature that enables you to customize a portal by applying or modifying external CSS files. It also allows you to edit any HTML element of your portal by adding CSS classes to it and specifying CSS properties, and see the visual impact of your changes in the real time. You must be logged in as a developer or administrator to use this feature in the Portal Designer.

The CSS Theme feature consists of two parts:

• Portal Theme Files Browser
• CSS Editor

In the Portal Theme Files browser, you can select Base Theme CSS and Custom Theme CSS files, and apply them to your portal. If you have a custom CSS file already configured and stored in your repository, you can navigate to this file and select it. The file overrides a base theme, instantly modifying the look of your portal.

The CSS Editor is designed for a more detailed theme editing. Through the intuitive CSS Editor UI, you can pinpoint any HTML element of your current portal theme, find its CSS class and modify it. It also allows you to save your changes in a CSS file, which then can be applied to another theme or another portal.

The Mobile Viewer is a web-based interface that you can use to access content and share it with other users, from a basic URL. When you use the Mobile Viewer, you do not need to save content as a Mobile Favorite or create a portal. Instead, you can organize content in a folder and distribute the URL to this folder to other users who can bookmark the URL and run that content online at any time.

One of the benefits of the Mobile Viewer is its simplicity. You can create and share your content through a URL in just three steps. Additionally, the Mobile Viewer instantly syncs with the designated repository folder. When you add, subtract, or modify content in the designated folder, these changes are instantly reflected in what you can access. Folder content also respects WebFOCUS security, so you can optionally hide some of the folder content from a group of users with a security rule.

WebFOCUS content can be viewed across different devices using Mobile Viewer. While the feature is especially helpful to users on mobile devices, it can also be used by desktop users in a Web browser. In both scenarios, it provides secure access to a specific set of content.

The Upload wizard and Connect to Data wizard offer a suite of data wrangling options, which are designed to help you prepare your data for future analytics. With these data wrangling tools, you can assess your data for validity and consistency, weed out errors, and enhance accuracy and uniformity of your data. Thanks to these options, you can spend less time collecting and cleaning data, and more time working on analysis and reporting.

The new Upload wizard allows you to preview and change the uploaded spreadsheets and delimited data files before you upload them to the repository. The tool supports multiple sheet upload. After the initial file selection is complete, the wizard shows you the default breakdown of your data into measures, dimensions, and hierarchies. At this point you can perform many advanced data preparation techniques, such as:

• Data grouping
• Joining multiple fact tables into a cluster
• Geo role determination
• Geo encoding
• Data profiling
• Pivoting with immediate preview/undo
• Creating and editing measure and dimension fields, dimension hierarchies, and attributes.

The full ribbon based interface of the new Upload wizard makes the process of preparing your data easy and intuitive. You can configure the view options to customize your Upload wizard UI and make it suit your needs. Once your synonym is complete, you can upload it to the repository, append it to an existing synonym, or save it as a template to allow repeated transformations.

In Release 8.2 Version 01M, the Upload wizard has been expanded to include additional functionality, such as BV+ capabilities, and an enhanced workflow.

Customers with Enterprise Data often have data that represent metrics associated with their territories, events, or logistical information.

The GEOGRAPHIC_ROLE attribute in a Master File can be used to identify the geographic role represented by the values in a column of data. The geographic roles known to the Reporting Server are listed in its geo_services.xml file, along with rules that associate combinations of characters with a specific geographic role.

The Upload wizard and Synonym Editor automatically assign a geographic role to a column if its field name contains characters that satisfy the rules associated with one of its known roles. For example, the following image shows that the upload wizard has assigned the geographic role State (Name) to the column named STATE.

If this role is not the correct one for the column, the user can override the association using a drop-down list to select an alternate geographic role. Following are the geographic roles assigned automatically assigned based on field names:

• CONTINENT
• COUNTRY
• STATE
• CITY
• US CITY
• US STATE
• US COUNTY
• ZIP3
• ZIP5