SmartView, and Integrated Application Development for Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management
Well, I’ve seen two things in R& D Central worth mentioning in the space of 30 minutes. The first is upcoming enhancements to SmartView that will be available in version 9.3, and the second is the Calculation Manager that will be part of the overall BPM Architect in a later release.
SmartView
For SmartView’s part, "Linked Views" allows you to use, in a free-form way and in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as well as in Excel, query results from Excel-based SmartView reports. Imagine (or go see for yourself) that you are preparing or reading a PowerPoint presentation or a planning document in Word, and some of the numbers in it originated in a SmartView report. You see a number of interest in there. So you right-click on it, and are quickly brought into Excel, where you see the full report there. Furthermore, the cell you’d highlighted in Word is highlighted in Excel, too. From there, you can do everything you can do in SmartView for Excel, including updating cells in the application and running a calc script (against Essbase). After updating cells, you can just refresh fields in the Word doc, and the new values are shown there.
The connection goes a little further. Basically (and I could be missing additional capabilities here), you can grab a set of cells from Excel, copy, and paste into Word or PowerPoint as fields. You can put these anywhere you want to in the text: into a table, within a paragraph, into the title or footer, and so on. This allows a very free-form consumption- essentially liberated from the data grid. And yet the fields are connected.
Works the same against Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Planning too.
SmartView also allows experts to enter custom MDX to go beyond what the query builder allows. (Personally, I think this is really important for exposing the MDX query capability of Essbase!)
Calculation Manager
The second thing was the Calculation Manager to be delivered with the BPM Architect. (I’m going to look at the rest of the BPM Architect later on.) I received a torrent of information on the Calculation Manager so I’ll summarize here. Basically, the Calculation Manager provides a single UI for constructing the logic of HFM and Planning applications (for example, business rules or calc scripts). It will provide a common UI for the common functionality between these two products, while allowing for product-specific capabilities to be exposed as well. There's a lot to consider:
- A visual flowchart-like designer for depicting the logic
- Product-specific or product-neutral renditions of the formulas and conditions being built.
- Common GUI for picking metadata ranges
- Rules can be shared at different scopes: within an app, between apps for a single product, with a goal of providing the ability to have rules that can be shared between products also sharable between products. (Of course, you’ll be able to see where a shared component is reused, as well, since changing it will change all uses of it.)
-You can modularize the components by packaging them as common components. These can be shared as well.
- Pre-existing calc scripts, business rules, HFM subroutines can be leverages as components as well
A business user would consider this to be a visual, approachable interface to guide them through the setup of an app. As a software developer, I’d analogize it to an IDE, but it’s far from a write-code-and-compile kind of interface.
So much more to see- I'll need to be disciplined to balance depth of discussion with ability to mention everthing worthwhile.
SmartView
For SmartView’s part, "Linked Views" allows you to use, in a free-form way and in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as well as in Excel, query results from Excel-based SmartView reports. Imagine (or go see for yourself) that you are preparing or reading a PowerPoint presentation or a planning document in Word, and some of the numbers in it originated in a SmartView report. You see a number of interest in there. So you right-click on it, and are quickly brought into Excel, where you see the full report there. Furthermore, the cell you’d highlighted in Word is highlighted in Excel, too. From there, you can do everything you can do in SmartView for Excel, including updating cells in the application and running a calc script (against Essbase). After updating cells, you can just refresh fields in the Word doc, and the new values are shown there.
The connection goes a little further. Basically (and I could be missing additional capabilities here), you can grab a set of cells from Excel, copy, and paste into Word or PowerPoint as fields. You can put these anywhere you want to in the text: into a table, within a paragraph, into the title or footer, and so on. This allows a very free-form consumption- essentially liberated from the data grid. And yet the fields are connected.
Works the same against Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Planning too.
SmartView also allows experts to enter custom MDX to go beyond what the query builder allows. (Personally, I think this is really important for exposing the MDX query capability of Essbase!)
Calculation Manager
The second thing was the Calculation Manager to be delivered with the BPM Architect. (I’m going to look at the rest of the BPM Architect later on.) I received a torrent of information on the Calculation Manager so I’ll summarize here. Basically, the Calculation Manager provides a single UI for constructing the logic of HFM and Planning applications (for example, business rules or calc scripts). It will provide a common UI for the common functionality between these two products, while allowing for product-specific capabilities to be exposed as well. There's a lot to consider:
- A visual flowchart-like designer for depicting the logic
- Product-specific or product-neutral renditions of the formulas and conditions being built.
- Common GUI for picking metadata ranges
- Rules can be shared at different scopes: within an app, between apps for a single product, with a goal of providing the ability to have rules that can be shared between products also sharable between products. (Of course, you’ll be able to see where a shared component is reused, as well, since changing it will change all uses of it.)
-You can modularize the components by packaging them as common components. These can be shared as well.
- Pre-existing calc scripts, business rules, HFM subroutines can be leverages as components as well
A business user would consider this to be a visual, approachable interface to guide them through the setup of an app. As a software developer, I’d analogize it to an IDE, but it’s far from a write-code-and-compile kind of interface.
So much more to see- I'll need to be disciplined to balance depth of discussion with ability to mention everthing worthwhile.
