Business Intelligence Tool Gets Better PeopleSoft Compatibility

The upcoming release of New Generation Software‘s NGS-IQ Version 6.4 has a little surprise for PeopleSoft‘s J.D. Edwards customer base. The new release of the popular Windows-based business intelligence tool for OS/400 servers now features support for PeopleSoft World and EnterpriseOne data dictionaries, which will provide consistency across things like date formats. Security has also been enhanced in this annual update of the tool.

NGS says that, through the new Meta External Reference feature, the NGS-IQ product will be able to read EnterpriseOne and World data dictionaries. This means that NGS-IQ users will be able to take advantage of the file and field names and formatting that have already been defined in the PeopleSoft data dictionary.

For the user, this will result in decimals being positioned correctly, fields being described in more meaningful ways, and dates being formatted just as they are in PeopleSoft (which is the Julian calendar format, we’re told). NGS does not restrict users to the Julian format and allows them to select from more than three dozen other data formats. But if they wanted to view dates as they’re used to seeing them in World or EnterpriseOne, they can.

The data dictionary enhancements will be welcomed by the “few hundred” World and EnterpriseOne that use NGS for business intelligence, says Bernard Gough, president and chief executive of Sacramento, California, based NGS. “We’re very pleased to provide them with an interface that does not require any additional logical files or overhead,” he says.

Security has also been enhanced with NGS-IQ 6.4. This release allows the administrator to authorize access to NGS-IQ at the library or the profile level, enabling the administrator to restrict access to all or just some data, and to options in the NGS-IQ software itself. NGS has extended this finer-grained control to query results sent as e-mail attachments, to FTP files, and to output from two other optional components of the NGS-IQ system: the Qport Access client module and the Qport SmartView OLAP module.

NGS says NGS-IQ will ship sometime this fall. For more information, go to www.ngsi.com.