BCD Ships New Reporting Tool in Time for COMMON

Published: March 28, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Business Computer Design Intl. must be hoping some of that Irish luck will rub off on its new iSeries new business intelligence software, Clover, which shipped on St. Patrick's Day. This week, the company will be looking for its pot of gold at the COMMON conference in Minneapolis, where demonstrations of Clover will be given, and details of the next version of the Nexus Web portal will be provided.

BCD unveiled Clover version 1.0 to the world at the COMMON Fall 2005 Conference in Orlando, Florida. The product functions as a plug-in to BCD's WebSmart development and runtime environment, and its array of wizards and templates are designed to remove much of the difficulty of designing and generating reports, graphs, and charts from iSeries data, with the output served in HTML, CSV, or Excel formats (the company is still working on a native iSeries PDF writer).

Clover GA

Since that first beta release, the Chicago software house and its development partner, Excel Systems of British Columbia, Canada, have been busy adding new functionality to the nascent report-writing tool. Chief among the new capabilities users will find in the currently shipping release, Clover version 1.13, is the inclusion of the new "smart charts" functionality, which the BCD organization acquired from an undisclosed third party.

Smart charts are pre-configured Flash components that Clover customers can use to build business intelligence dashboards and executive information system (EIS) solutions. Users will have a choice of a variety of Smart Charts, including standard dashboard fare like speedometer indicators, color-coded stop lights, assorted gauges, funnel charts, and other three-dimensional graphs used to communicate key performance indicators (KPIs), says Duncan Kenzie, president of Excel Systems.

"Lets say you put on a Web site a portlet that shows weekly sales figures. Anything that is under $250,000 a week is low, $400,000 a week is good, and above $500,000 is great," Kenzie says. "You could create a speedometer needle in Clover, where it registers as red if it's below $250,000, and green if it's above $500,000." These smart chart components are pre-configured for users, and all they have to do is provide the XML data from the source, which can be an iSeries or other data store, he says. Users can also build their own Clover templates.

One of the advantages of Clover is it's constantly pulling live data from its sources via RPG CGI routines, Kenzie says. "You get real-time data with Clover, as opposed to a data warehouse situation, where you might have to capture the data every night," he says. "It's all Flash. You just provide the XML data, then it draws the chart dynamically."

While Clover and WebSmart are based on the same core foundation (users must have the correct license key to unlock the Clover functionality within WebSmart), Clover also shares an affinity with Nexus, BCD's Web portal software, which is also largely based on WebSmart.

Nexus V3

Kenzie says that, while the previous version of Nexus was good at supporting iSeries business applications running in a Web server, the upcoming version 3 will focus on better content management and search capabilities, continuing to improve security, and an improved look and feel through the use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques.

"The major part of Nexus we're promoting in version 3, which we spent a considerable amount of time enhancing, is the whole user experience managing pages," Kenzie says. In particular, BCD has expanded the concept of groups and subgroups, and is giving managers more control over what resources the groups can access.

The improved granularity of groups is protected by security features that have been available since version 2, including the capability to validate within the Web server that particular users are authorized to access particular URLs, so they can't just cut and paste URLs into a browser to access zones that are forbidden to them, Kenzie says.

Version 3 also brings new drag and drop page design features that are as flexible as the page components users can find in Google GMail service or Microsoft's Live service, Kenzie says. In the same way that these services use AJAX technology to allow users to customize their Web experience by dragging and dropping elements like news, weather, and stock information, Nexus users will also be able to customize their particular portal with version 3. "We're using AJAX in the background to update that content," Kenzie says.

Lastly, BCD has a couple of Web site redesigns in the works. The first is the new customer support Web site at www.mybcdsoftware.com, which is slated to go live in the second quarter. And with a little luck, the major overhaul of BCD's public Web site at www.bcdsoftware.com should be completed by the end of the summer.