Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Free is good. Free lets users test or evaluate applications. Just ask InetSoft Technology. It reportedly launched Style Scope Free Edition, a free BI dashboard software application derived from the company’s enterprise-class commercial dashboard product, Style Scope.

 

Style Scope Free Edition is a small-footprint server that delivers Web-based interactive Flash dashboards and visualizations. The Java-based application can be installed on any Windows, Unix or Mac desktop and can be connected to data in standard relational databases as well as spreadsheets. The types of dashboards that can be created range from monitoring and executive dashboards to sophisticated interactive visual analysis and business management dashboards.

 

Users step through a simple setup wizard to point to the location of the operational data and create datasets. With a drag and drop dashboard designer, dashboard components such as charts, gauges, selection lists, and date sliders are placed on a worksheet design space. Then the fields to be displayed or filtered are dropped on top of them. In minutes a fully-functional reporting dashboard can be built and shared inside a local area network.

 

Both the Free Edition and the commercial product would suit home-based and mobile staff because the dashboard delivery is via a browser. They are provided URLs to open in their browser, and the dashboards are displayed on their home PCs in whatever browser they use.

 

Style Scope is an easy to use, interactive dashboard software that includes real time reporting. It is an edition of Style Intelligence that focuses on business data exploration by combining Data Block™ technology with visualization.

 

InetSoft's Data Block enables data mashup in a building-block style. It creates performance tuned and security-controlled data blocks that can be transformed and assembled by business users for real-time business questions. These real time reporting options allow for quick and informed business decisions. Visualized analysis is constructed in real-time by dropping data items into visual elements such as charts, metrics and selections. The resulting view reveals the intrinsic relationships among the data.

 

InetSoft recently released a new edition of Style Intelligence that features enhanced business data mapping, combining multi-dimensional charting and geographic charting.  This allows interactive dashboards to display continuous measures such as population or sales volume by using color ranges across any geographically defined boundary on the local, state and national levels, and even custom-defined areas such as sales regions or political districts.

 

The integration of mapping and chart engines also permits using multi-charts that compare multiple maps side-by-side, and also permits the combination of data tables alongside visual maps of data so that drilling-down into a region displays custom metrics and detailed data. The end result, InetSoft said, is a data-rich application of geospatial mapping that makes finding answers and drawing conclusions from large data sets a much more efficient task for a business user.

 

 “The sharing capabilities of our new free dashboard offering stand out from the other free solutions out there,” Mark Flaherty, vice president of marketing at InetSoft, said. “For a small business or a single department, this makes for a very robust dashboard solution, offering state-of-the-art Flex-based chart rendering and interactivity. And for mid- and large-sized enterprises it offers an entry point for self-evaluation or proof of concept before stepping up to our commercial business intelligence offering.”