MicroStrategy today announced a new caliber of information dashboards for business users, MicroStrategy Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards. MicroStrategy has combined advanced data visualization and animation with its industrial-strength business intelligence platform to deliver highly intuitive dashboards that yield greater business insight and are usable by more people than ever before.

Dashboards provide easy-to-use access to enterprise data and help companies track business performance and optimize decision-making. “Dashboards resonate with business users because they provide valuable at-a-glance information to effectively manage and monitor business performance,” said Wayne Eckerson, Director of TDWI Research and author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. “MicroStrategy has elevated the functionality and visualization capabilities of its dashboards to provide users with a tremendous amount of information in an easy-to-use and compelling manner, all within the context of its highly integrated BI platform.”

MicroStrategy’s Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards enable business users to intuitively flip through many different perspectives of corporate performance without ever leaving the dashboard, allowing them to quickly and easily identify problems and diagnose root causes. Dashboard designers can combine data from a variety of data sources, providing the user with multi-disciplined, multi-dimensional performance feedback on every dashboard.

“We’re very excited about the next-generation dashboard capabilities in MicroStrategy 8.1,” said Stan Carman, Manager of BI Infrastructure at Lowe's Companies. “MicroStrategy’s new dashboards will help users across our organization better manage their business areas with greater insight, efficiency, and transparency. These dashboards are significantly more effective in communicating business performance.”

By incorporating Adobe Flash, MicroStrategy dashboards offer innovative ways for users of all skill levels to derive insight from their data. The dashboards are highly responsive to users, providing a wide range of information views and increased information exploration options through the unique features of Flash. MicroStrategy 8’s Flexible Rendering Architecture lets each user determine whether a dashboard or report is best presented in thin-client AJAX mode or interactive Flash mode.

“MicroStrategy’s new dashboards are visually appealing and set a new standard for interactivity with business data,” said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of business development and marketing for the Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe. “Using Adobe’s latest rich Internet application technology, MicroStrategy dashboards deliver an engaging user experience that can improve interpreting and analyzing business data in a graphical format. We’re proud to team with MicroStrategy to bring this exciting innovation to the business intelligence market.”

Flash rendering allows MicroStrategy users to create self-contained dashboards that include full interactivity, visualization functionality, and data content. Users can interact with their dashboards on planes, present their dashboards in meetings, or analyze corporate performance at any location regardless of network connection availability.

MicroStrategy 8.1 includes a new library of advanced visualization “widgets” built using the Adobe Flex Builder 2 Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which renders in Flash Player 9. These visualization “widgets” enable dashboards to express data in much more meaningful ways than is possible with traditional graph types. The rich and interactive nature of Flash can express relationships that are not possible with static graphs, such as allowing business users to view time-series data as graphical ‘movies’ that give deeper insight into business trends. Users can rewind and fast forward through the time series and even pause the movie to drill-down to get more detail on areas of interest.

In this release, MicroStrategy delivers an extension to the Adobe Flex Builder 2 IDE, which allows MicroStrategy customers to extend their MicroStrategy visualization library. Using Adobe Flex Builder 2 and the MicroStrategy SDK, users can create any new Flex-based visualization “widget” and insert it into their MicroStrategy visualization library. Customers can also use the Adobe Flex Builder extension to insert 3rd party Flex-based widgets into their MicroStrategy visualization library.

MicroStrategy Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards allow business users to create their own “personal dashboards.” Using MicroStrategy’s zero-footprint WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) Web interface, business users can create dashboards using simple drag and drop actions. No longer does the IT department need to create all dashboards for the business; users can now build the dashboards they want, increasing the use and adoption of business intelligence systems.

MicroStrategy’s Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards inherit the industrial-strength attributes of the MicroStrategy 8 business intelligence platform, including enterprise scalability, robust security, and powerful administration, allowing MicroStrategy dashboards to easily serve thousands of users. With automatic personalization and security, a single dashboard can be deployed throughout an enterprise with each user seeing only their slice of the business and the data that they are allowed to see. MicroStrategy’s dashboards use firewall-friendly DHTML, so that dashboards can safely be shared beyond corporate walls.

MicroStrategy’s modular and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has allowed MicroStrategy’s new dashboard functionality to be tightly integrated with its reporting, OLAP, ad-hoc, and proactive alerting functionality. “I’m proud of our modular and integrated architecture that allowed us to add new capabilities like dynamic dashboards,” said Sanju Bansal, COO of MicroStrategy. “With the addition of Adobe Flash into our architecture, a single dashboard or report design can be rendered optionally in Adobe Flash, DHTML, Adobe PDF, or Microsoft Office formats. MicroStrategy is the first company to provide fully interchangeable Adobe Flash and DHTML rendering for dashboards.”

"These new dynamic dashboards are another exciting innovation in the BI industry, allowing more people to get better insight into their corporate performance," said Bansal. “Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards integrate MicroStrategy’s ROLAP architecture with world-class visualization technology, empowering business users of all levels to interact with their data in compelling new ways.”

MicroStrategy’s Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards are currently being beta-tested and are expected to be generally available in the first half of 2007, as part of the 8.1 release.