Business Intelligence Battle Royale – Web Dashboards

A Comparison of BI Tools by Kingsley Hau

Recently I have been introduced to a few business intelligence platforms which I haven’t worked with before and it was suggested that a comparison between them would be an interesting topic for an article. As I have already written articles about MicroStrategy and SQL Server Reporting Services, I thought it was quite a cool idea and set about creating a few quick and simple dashboards. There are 4 different technologies in play here which are MicroStrategy, SSRS, Tableau Public, and QlikView.

Major Accident Hazard Analysis by Jez Stroud

Yesterday I published an article on my entry into the Aiimi internal BI competition; the Stock Analyser Application which allowed a user to track stocks for different companies and decide whether or not to invest into them based on the displayed key performance indicators.

Stock Analyser Application by Kingsley Hau

I have recently been blogging about an internal BI competition within Aiimi to create some great dashboards/mobile applications. The deadline was monday just gone and we presented our apps to our managers and seniors yesterday. With the competition now over I think it would be nice to write a few blogs for each of the applications to showcase our work.

Aiimi’s Internal BI Competition Update

Last week I wrote a short blog hinting at an internal BI competition being held by Aiimi to see who could design and create the best looking (and practical) dashboard in MicroStrategy.

Today is the deadline for that competition and since we are coming to the final stages of developing our entries I thought I’d write a quick blog to display some of the differences in comparison to the dashboards I showed last week and the ones we have today.

Aiimi’s BI Team learn MicroStrategy Web Design tips from Sylvain Le Moel

For the past two days our business intelligence team has undergone some training provided by Sylvain Le Moel to help improve our approaches and knowledge of how to develop and use MicroStrategy mobile web dashboards.

Sylvain Le Moel is a senior director of the Mobile Solutions department in MicroStrategy with many years of experience in developing dashboards. His main aim during his time with our team was to teach us how to best make use of business intelligence and extract the greatest value from mobile web dashboards.

It’s On – Aiimi’s collaboration project with Southwark Schools to provide business intelligence around activities/clubs for young people

After meeting with Southwark Council and a number of local schools, it became clear that a number of young people in Southwark were not only unclear on what activities/clubs were available to them but the young people would be more likely to attend activities/clubs if they knew who else was attending. Therefore For almost a year now, Aiimi has been working in collaboration with 12 students from 4 schools from Southwark to create an online portal, called It’s On, which will provide intelligence and analysis regarding the local activities young people are involved in. The outcome of It’s On will act as a proof of concept and will feed into a further project that the Council will be starting later in the year to create a social media site for young people in Southwark. One of the key elements of the project is to bring increased awareness and an understanding of the IT and more specifically business intelligence to young people. One of the many functions of the portal is to present statistical reports (information) regarding the demographic breakdown of young people who attend specific activities and activity types. To generate these reports, Aiimi has decided to use the SSRS tool.

IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Installing Client Side Certificate for SSL Authentication

This short blog is the final instalment of a series of blogs which have explained how to configure a server to use SSL authentication (IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Configuring Server Side SSL Authentication) and how to create a pair of self-signed certificates using the Windows makecert tool (IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Creating SSL Client and Server Certificates).

This blog will explain how a client certificate should be installed onto a web browser which will enable it to access the website being protected by a SSL authentication layer.

For this example, Internet Explorer 9 will be the browser used so the steps may not exactly fit for any other mediums such as Chrome or Firefox. However I’m sure that those browsers will have similar configuration options which allow a user to install certificates.