Business Objects Releases BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1

By DMReview.com Web Editorial Staff


 

Business Objects, a provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, announced BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1, the latest version of its business intelligence suite that enables organizations to track, understand and manage enterprise performance.

Available now, BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 provides enhanced performance and analysis features, increased data integration productivity, streamlined dashboard personalization and superior enterprise deployment capabilities. Together, these new capabilities make analysis accessible to casual report consumers and facilitate enterprise BI standardization while lowering the cost of deployment. BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 provides organizations with one integrated, functionally complete BI environment for all users, including casual report consumers, report authors, power users and executives.

BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 expands the unique on-report analysis capabilities of WebIntelligence. The new version enables users to sort and filter data, add and remove report data, and include simple calculations without switching to a sophisticated report-authoring environment. For power users, WebIntelligence now provides expanded OLAP drill-through capabilities and rich OLAP calculation creation supporting the full functionality of the MDX multidimensional query language. In addition, Enterprise 6.1 provides access to Oracle9i OLAP, expanding on the existing connectivity to all other leading OLAP servers including Hyperion Essbase, IBM DB2 OLAP Server, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and SAP BW.

BusinessObjects Data Integrator offers a new graphical user interface for enhanced ease of use. Additionally, Data Integrator 6.1 incorporates comprehensive data preview and profiling directly into the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) environment. By enabling users to perform these operations at any point in the process, Data Integrator reduces design and data validation time and increases IT efficiency. End users ultimately benefit from information that is trustworthy, accurate, and relevant.

Dashboards and scorecards are today's most popular method of analyzing and monitoring business performance. As such, dashboards are moving from being an executive cockpit for a small number of users to a daily business tool for mainstream employees. With BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1, users can more easily personalize their own display of key performance indicators, maximizing dashboard relevance and impact. For example, a user can organize metrics by initiative, as well as select metric attributes such as target, trend and variance that are most important to them. Furthermore, enhanced alert management features make it easy for users to sort multiple alerts and focus on critical issues, accelerating organizational responsiveness.

BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 also continues to facilitate the deployment of global BI projects with a new multilingual server that enables a single server instance to deliver BI content in multiple languages. This significantly eases the processing burden on organizations that deploy localized versions of the same report to different countries. In addition, BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 includes increased support of open standards such as LDAP, Web Services, and SOAP as well as integration with additional J2EE application servers – enabling customers to continue to leverage their existing technology infrastructure.

Today's business intelligence deployments often go beyond simple reporting to require integration of disparate sources, data warehouse and data mart management, reporting, analysis, and enterprise dashboards. BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 enables organizations to manage all elements of the BI system holistically, with a central view of all objects and all dependencies in the system – from data source to end user dashboard. Enterprise 6.1 includes end-to-end impact analysis that gives administrators complete visibility into the interdependencies in their BI system. This means that an administrator can look at a column in a source system and see which reports and dashboards are affected downstream in the BI deployment. This significantly improves the ability to manage complex BI systems and dramatically lowers the total cost of ownership.