Product overview: Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE Plus

Dashboards

Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards is a portal-style dashboard whose primary purpose is to publish Answers reports. The product provides a Web-based design environment that allows the user to choose a template and insert reports. The layout is column-based. The user defines several columns and drops report objects into them. In addition to Answers reports, external links and user-coded HTML can be displayed.

Objects can be grouped in sections. The sections can be displayed or hidden by the end user at run time. When a section is hidden, the section below it moves up to fill the space. This provides a simple way for end users to format their view without any technical understanding at all.

The dashboards contain several features that provide customized dynamic content to the user. Dashboard prompts can drive the Answers reports. An individual prompt can control one or more Answers reports. The dashboards can also contain individualized views. There are good navigation and parameter passing features to allow the dashboard designer to create guided analysis for the end user.

It is also possible to display content in the dashboards conditionally. The condition is simply a query defined in Answers. If the query returns one or more lines, it is regarded as true; otherwise, it is regarded as false. This interesting feature is referred to, somewhat oddly, as ‘Guided Navigation’, and it provides an elegant way to display alerts. The term comes from the fact that the links “guide” users to the next stage in analysis, usually a report or dashboard that is focused on helping you solve the issue that has arisen.

The dashboard also allows users to define bookmarks for their own use or for others.

THIS PAGE REPRESENTS ONLY A VERY SHORT EXTRACT FROM THE FULL REVIEW.

TO VIEW THE FULL REVIEW YOU CAN PURCHASE THE REVIEW INDIVIDUALLY OR PURCHASE AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION TO THE OLAP REPORT WHICH ALLOWS ACCESS TO ALL OLAP REPORT CONTENT.