Building blocks for an intelligent enterprise

Srirajan Rajagopalant, Bhavik Jhaveri and Bill Kotraba
Datavision Limited (HK) / LogiXML Inc. (USA)
Hong Kong SAR, China

In this paper, the authors discuss how the education sector can benefit from using the Unified BI Platform. A purely XML-based report building application allows report developers to build full-featured, interactive Web-based reports, charting, dashboards, and portals within a single unified development environment. Report consumers and business users can view and interact with all of their key business data in one place, perform one-click calculations on chosen data sets, sort and group data, and drill-down into charts and graphs.

Web-based Reporting

Create and publish comprehensive Web-based reports in a standard Web browser complete with crosstab and drill-down options, print and Web formatting and a wide variety of charting and graphing possibilities. Developers or end-users are not required to know JavaScript or ASP.NET to build reports. By connecting to any database, users can publish staff calendars, change of staff data, and the like.

Dynamic, Interactive Analysis Grid

Standard corporate reports can be transformed into fully dynamic, interactive reports, extending reporting features to end users. Developers can create an Analysis Grid in minutes to allow business end users to explore data further within their Web browsers, and get at the information in a report that is most meaningful to them. With the Analysis Grid, users can filter data based on column values, add/remove/move columns, change table layouts and paging, group data rows, aggregate data, create charts, and much more.

Dashboards and Portals

Gather and present data from numerous sources within a single location. Create role-based dashboards and portals that give end users at-a-glance information pertinent to their individual roles.

Security

Comprehensive and flexible security options allow developers and administrators to use "built-in" security or tie into existing authorization and authentication systems, such as databases, NT Security, Active Directory and OLAP. Developers can enable user and role-based authorization at the data column and row levels and show, hide or disable report elements.

The authors will also explain how some of the Education and Social Services organizations apply this in real life:

Colstrip, Montana Public Schools , Educational Benchmarking , Fort Worth Independent School District , Horizon Educational Resources, Luther Consulting, LLC, North Hertfordshire College, Pennsylvania State University, Scottish University for Industry (U.K.), State of Texas Region VII Educational Service Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Newcastle upon Tyne (U.K.).