Panorama NovaView 3.0
NovaView, part of the NovaView e-BI Suite, uses a briefing-book product to store different views or reports. You can use the desktop version of NovaView to create views and briefing books, then publish those books to the Panorama XML repository, which you can access from either the desktop NovaView client or the NovaView Web interface. The repository information is stored in an open XML file format.
NovaView comes in both full desktop client and thin-client Web versions. In the Web version, you can choose whether you want to use small Java applets—which improve the user experience—or pure Dynamic HTML (DHTML). When you deploy the Web version, you choose one of two modes: intranet mode, in which each user is named and managed, and Internet mode, in which all users are treated as anonymous. Figure 4, page 38, displays NovaView's charting capability.
Suitability for Specific Roles
For the power analyst, NovaView is excellent. NovaView fully supports almost all Analysis Services features. You can create a wide variety of calculated members by using either NovaView proprietary functions or by building multidimensional expressions (MDX) directly.
For the data gatherer, NovaView is good. Although the application doesn't include tools for directly guiding and limiting the user's experience, both parameters (slider controls that adjust query values) and bubble-up exceptions (cell colors that vary based on values more detailed than those displayed) are valuable tools for guiding the data gatherer.
For the report user, NovaView is good. The reporting is focused on interactive use instead of production reports, but you can at least create headers and footers when printing.
Strengths and Weaknesses
NovaView fully supports nearly all Analysis Services features, both in client/server and in zero-footprint Web options. Some users found NovaView's UI—specifically, the way that you select members—to be unusual, but most users were able to figure it out without assistance.
NovaView is the only product we reviewed that directly supports writing data back to the server through the thin-client UI, facilitating the creation of a budgeting or planning application. (Note that ProClarity supports data write-back in the full client/server tool, and Cognos PowerPlay and the Office PivotTable tools have documented techniques available for adding write-back capability through custom coding.)
NovaView directly supports bubble-up exception highlighting. Most products let you flag exceptions based on the value in the current cell, but an exception that bubbles up from a hidden detail level can reveal underlying problems even in a high-level report. Although in Analysis Manager you can write sophisticated MDX expressions that make the bubble-up exceptions available to any tool that displays server-side formatting, only NovaView has wizards in the client tool that build this type of MDX expression for you.
Another innovative feature in the NovaView interface is the use of parameters—slider controls that can adjust almost any numeric value, such as the number of members you want in a top-count or bottom-count query. NovaView's examples and documentation are less fully developed than most, but the tool includes excellent supporting files and samples.
The biggest concern with NovaView is that the interface is still unpolished. For example, you often see an alert box containing an internal error message such as
(Method '~' of object '~' failed)
in pnFunction Module 0 in DoWebFunction
These messages are more appropriate to the beta version of a product than to a finished version intended for widespread deployment. On a similar note, in the version we tested, when we changed the way members display on an axis, the product immediately switched to manual mode, with the result that no numbers appeared in the grid. This is clearly a bug, and Panorama will surely fix it quickly because the company is very responsive to bug reports. However, our testers and consultants encountered an uncomfortable number of bugs, ranging from inconvenient to serious.
The published licensing scheme for NovaView is rather complicated, with different packages based on intranet named users and Internet concurrent users. Also, because NovaView is headquartered abroad (in Israel), some North and South American companies might have been concerned in the past about working with a supplier that operates in a time zone far removed from that of their development teams. However, now that Panorama is establishing a North American organization, this concern should diminish.
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