ProClarity Analytics Platform Release 5.0
ProClarity client products are available in three versions. ProClarity Professional—the version we used for most of our tests—is a client/server application that includes full ad hoc capability, including an optional authoring tool. ProClarity Analytics Server (formerly ProClarity Enterprise Server) is available in both Enterprise and Standard editions, each of which supports either a rich client (the same functionality as ProClarity Professional, but in the context of a Web browser) or a zero-footprint browser-based client. ProClarity products are designed to be open and extensible, letting developers use VBA to develop applications based on the ProClarity platform. ProClarity Enterprise Server has additional options available, including Business Reporter, which lets you create free-form reports from within an Excel worksheet. Figure 5, page 40, shows a graph in ProClarity Professional.
Suitability for Specific Roles
For the power analyst, ProClarity is excellent. In addition to advanced visualization tools, a broad range of options for displaying values on the axes, access to advanced Analysis Services features, and the open availability of MDX make this a useful tool for a power analyst.
For the data gatherer, ProClarity is excellent. Controlling the user experience does require custom VBA code, but by using the briefing-book storage mechanism, you can easily provide for the user a set of reports that are easy to use and modify. The new thin-client interface in version 5.0 is professional looking; even with a pure HTML, zero-footprint interface, the controls are easy to use, and responsiveness is excellent.
For the report user, ProClarity is fair. Layout and formatting options for printed reports are limited (the lack of an option for changing the title on the grid is particularly frustrating). However, the product can create static versions of the reports, and you can print a set of reports that cycle through all the values of a slicer field
Strengths and Weaknesses
ProClarity's biggest strength is that it supports nearly all Analysis Services features in both its client/server and zero-footprint options. In addition, ProClarity includes proprietary visualization tools such as the decomposition view, and users can program or embed ProClarity into custom applications. New in version 5.0 are customizable headers and footers for printing reports. ProClarity has an option to automatically cycle through the set of members in a slicer as you print; however, when you print a report, levels within a report that were indented on the screen switch to full columns, taking up extra space on the page.
As a weakness, most of our testers found ProClarity's UI frustrating and cumbersome. ProClarity 5.0 has improved the UI somewhat, particularly in the Web version, but you often need to switch between multiple panes to create a report, and showing members from multiple levels of a dimension together on a report is difficult.
ProClarity Analytics Server Enterprise Edition includes the new Excel-based Business Reporter tool. By using the Business Reporter, you can create a staging query, then use special functions within Excel to create free-form, flexible reports. This tool appears to be a powerful mechanism for creating infinitely customizable reports, but the functions use explicit row and column numbers to retrieve values from the hidden staging query. As long as you use the functions in blocks—for example, to display all the children of a member—modifying the staging query automatically adjusts the functions in the spreadsheet. But if you use the functions to create a free-form report, changing the data source can easily cause the formulas to retrieve incorrect values—with no warning or errors. This failure is unacceptable, particularly because the Excel PivotTable in Office XP offers the same flexibility in a function that doesn't inadvertently return an incorrect value.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
None of these five products provides a solution that clearly meets the needs of all users. Each product has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Crystal Analysis Professional 8.0 is a first-generation tool that lacks analytical depth but includes an innovative approach for guiding the experience for data gatherers. The Office PivotTable tools are easy to work with, include great charts, and are customizable, but they don't include a thin-client Web-deployment option. NovaView is focused on Analysis Services and provides perhaps the richest set of raw functionality. However, this product still has a lot of minor bugs and doesn't yet contain the same depth of customer-support options in North America as the other tools do. PowerPlay has the best option for creating publishable reports from cubes and can access virtually any type of data server, but it has limited support for features specific to Analysis Services. ProClarity, like NovaView, focuses on ad hoc reporting, not production reports, but it supports most Analysis Services features such as data write-back, and it is highly customizable. All the products have significant limitations. For example, none of the products lets a user create a simple graphically driven executive information system (EIS) report without programming.
We hope this high-level overview helps you choose a client tool for Analysis Services. If you need more data to make your decision, see the highlights of our detailed analysis in the Web sidebar, "Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty." To set up your own test, you can download the .xls test matrix file and the .cab and .mdb sample database files available online at InstantDoc ID 26399.
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