BristolReport empowers the user to design and publish his custom Business Management Reports.
OLAP Front-ends can be grouped in three categories :
Unstructured reports design is considered as an IT specialists task. BristolReport innovates and greatly simplifies the design process to let the user more rapidly react to environment evolutions and directly define and adjust the content of his Business Performance Reports.
Guided by wizards, the user defines within Excel his functional view by pulling together "bricks" of data called InfoSets. The wizards let the user shape the InfoSet by hiding or displaying labels or dimensions properties. All the formating and Excel complementary calculations remain at the user's disposal.
One report can display at the same time information coming from different cubes or different data sources.
As an example, a report can display data coming from a cube over the Web through a WebService complemented with data coming from a local cube.
The drawback of "unstructured" reports is a high risk of inconsistency of the data. Specially with the type of product where each cell contains a formula linked to the data source. How in the same time give all the freedom in the design of a report and insure that on Geography change, the report will "consistently" display the selected Geography ? BristolReport provides to the user a more robust model based on InfoSets and InfoSets consistency.
BristolReport Selector is simple. All the selection and filtering are grouped within one wizard.
The user has the choice between all the filtering methods such as lists, levels, hierarchies, properties values, top/bottom, comparison, etc.
Finally a selection per-se consists of either a single selection step or multiple steps.
Steps are then conjugated together with verbs such as add, keep, remove, sort or ignore.
BristolReport KPI Builder lets a user define any type of calculated measures or members.
Adding to your documents equations, contributions, ranking, benchmarking, moving totals or averages is now a piece of cake.
Finally BristolReport KPI builder handles all time-series MDX based functions, and also uses features like dynamic sets which can be refered in KPIs.
If your Cube does not contain any "true" time dimension, the KPI builder will let you specify which one of your dimensions could be used as a "time" dimension.
When this unique feature of BristolReport is activated for a dimension, any local Excel formulas added the first member of this dimension will be applied to all the members, even after changing the selected members, for this dimension. The power of multidimensional calculated members is here allied to the ease of use of Excel formulas.
For application developers a complete and documented object model extends the Excel object model using the same pattern.
Authoring reports is not an end. The user needs to communicate and publish his reports to a community of users. BristolReport offers a complete range of publishing solutions.