BI review & help

Here are some tips we collected over the years about dashboard design:

Page Layout

• Less is more - don't put too many views in the page.
• Rule of thumb - no more than five reports in one page.
• Don't use scrolling - the average user won't scroll down the screen.
• Position in screen - some researches made about this subject and here are the recommendations:
• Top-Left - it's the part of the screen that the user looks at first. Put there the most important data.
• Center of the screen - the part the user looks after the top-left. Put there the second-most important data.
• Top-Right, Bottom-Left - Neutral parts.
• Bottom-Right - The user won't pay attention to it, don't put there important data.
• Fixed menus in every page.
• Small amount of navigation targets in every page. Too much navigation paths will cause confusion.
• Concentrate on the main page - in 90% of the cases the user will stay there.
• Add graphic components and highlight them if necessary.
• Blue color only to links (and underline, of course).

Views Layout

• Two digits after the decimal point - in non-integer number, put only two digits after the decimal point. The human mind can't understand more than that.
• Focus on the clarity of the data and not only on its beauty. For example, 3D pie charts are very beautiful, but flatting them will make them more clear to the user.
• Measures have meaning only when compared to other data. Don't put stand-alone measure.
• Pay attention to graphical change between the data and not only colors. Remember that there are color-blind users.
• Text is more clear than icons.
• Use the San Serif and Arial fonts. They are the most readable to the user.
• Align the text only to one side and not to the middle. It seems better to programmers, but users want their text aligned to the left or to the right.
• Colors - don't use too much color. The dashboard page is not a jungle. Use colors of the same family.
• Put dark text on bright background the vise versa.

And to conclude - use CSS whenever you can. It will save you much time and effort.

In many cases, extraction of Panorama view's MDX code is necessary. For example, in order to check whether the performance bottleneck is in Panorama or in the OLAP server, you can take the MDX code, run it in SQL Server Management Studio and compare run times. You can take it further more but I'll leave it for future posts.

In Panorama Desktop program, click on Tools -> Direct MDX... and then CTRL + ALT + V. Then, you can copy it and use it in any way you want.

I'm glad to announce that two new Panorama forums were opened in the last days:
The first one is Panorama's Technical forum (English only). From now on you can get answers using this forum and see another users' problems and answers.
The second one is independent Panorama forum (Hebrew only). This forum was created by Michael Ra'am, ex-Panorama consultor. Its purpose is to be a place for sharing knowledge and ideas.
I believe you'll see me in both forums. See ya!

In some of our projects, we develop the Panorama views in the development environment along with the Data Warehouse, the ETL, the Cubes, etc. That's because the customers want to see how their product will look like before we deploy the views in the production environment. So, how do you deploy Panorama views from one environment to the other?

1. Create the new book - If it's a new briefing book, create it using the Panorama NovaView Administrator program. If it's already exist you can skip this step.
2. Copy the content - The book's content is by default in c:\<Panorama Folder>\E-BI\books\<Book Name>. Copy the content of this directory from the dev machine to the production machine. This is not enought because the views are still looking at the dev environment, so:
3. Change the view's properties - You need to have a very simple program (let's call it PanoramaDeployUtil) that iterates over all the views in the given folder (and its sub folders, recursively) and change its properties. I recommend opening the view's file using xml reader and change the element \pnView\Root\Cube\Properties. You need to set its properties CubeAddress, CubeName & CubeDB according to the new environment's values (CubeAddress is the server address). Just run this program and the views will look at the new environment.
4. Check - check yourself and make sure everything is ok by opening Panorama Web Access or Panorama Desktop and see that the values shown are the production's values.

Know that you can always open the Panorama Desktop and change the views one by one by hand.

Enjoy.