XWIS DecisionPoint Designer - A First Look

As a long time dashboard developer and visualization consultant I became interested in alternative solutions as SAP will be de-emphasizing Dashboard Designer (Xcelsius). At the 2013 SAP BusinessObjects Conference I was introduced to a dashboard development platform from Antivia, the 
makers of  XWIS, XWIS Advantage and XWIS Anywhere.

XWIS DecisionPoint Designer includes a user experience that is immediately familiar and also powerful. A palette of visual components are dropped onto a canvas to design any user interface that you want. By connecting to a DecisionPoint DataCenter you have access to a host of data sources. Once built, the dashboards can be shared to the web or a XWIS server for easy enterprise access.

The Designer Interface

The DecisionPoint designer is made up of a series of panels for building the dashboard and accessing the data sources. Everything is done via drag-n-drop. The panels include:

• Components
• Object Browser
• Data Browser
• Object Panel
• Context aware Properties

When first starting DecisionPoint, you are presented to connect to the server and choose a data source. The front end is a very polished interface and help is available while using the interface. Anybody that has used SAP Dashboard Designer will feel comfortable with the large list of components including all the charts and selectors,and data navigators.. Natively data aware components are also available in the Data Display folder. Included here is a Google Map for building location intelligent dashboards.  I especially like the tree interface in the component browser that is searchable by typing the first letter of the component you are looking for. The designer includes two modes; quick and advanced. Toggling between the two is easy but I would like to have a keyboard shortcut rather than just a toolbar and menu option.Quick mode is useful when working on the interface and not tweaking with the component properties or assigning data. Double clicking the canvas title will display just the canvas.

Designing without the sheet

DecisionPoint is different than Dashboard Designer in many ways, the most obvious is that Microsoft Excel is not used to define meta data and business rules. Logic is added to your dashboard as expressions in the properties of the component or at the data level in the object panel. The interface for entering logic is enhanced with syntax highlighting and code completion. For example, to define a toggle button action, you choose what to happen from a list when the toggle is on and when it is off. New data objects are also created using expressions. They even came up with a clever way to implement dynamic visibility that won’t make you talk to yourself. Using Views and Viewsets, (think Canvas), you place your components on them and enable when these are displayed. There is an option to make one of your Views as the Main view.

Putting on the Components

The list of visual controls is large and you should not have a problem finding the right component to visualize your data. Antivia is continually refining the product and could be adding new ones every few releases. You won’t find a radio button component in the release that I tested but a nice alternative is the Tab Bar which provides several styles that look very nice and may be easier to use on tablets.

Your components need to connect to data and with DecisionPoint it could not be any easier. By dragging a data source on top of the component it becomes linked and display the data live from the result objects. If you want to show different columns, just drop more the columns into data panel. The order of the columns sometimes matters especially when they are connected to a table.. Again this is quite easy and intuitive. As you set properties of the result object, the connected components are updated. You can change many aspects of the connected data columns including the Label, Format and the Aggregation Type to further define the functionality of the dashboard.

Aside from being able to see your data live during design is a nifty feature called LivePreview. You can view how your dashboard will look in a browser or mobile device while continuing to tweak things and the live view updates in real time. This could be a huge time saver. With LivePreview the ability to work collaboratively with other developers or clients becomes possible. Antivia has done a good job here in providing a write-once see-anywhere approach that will allow you to deploy to mobile devices whenever your users are ready.

I was able to get a demonstration of the data management facility called XWIS DataCenter. This is the server side tool that is used to prepare your data for the dashboards. XWIS DataCenter is open to any data source that can be accessed via SQL but contains wizard functions to connect to your BusinessObjects universes and Web Intelligence reports.

In Conclusion

This was just a quick look at a very capable new application for building enterprise dashboards and BI applications. If you are considering new interactive dashboards in your organization and want a fairly easy way to build for both desktop and mobile devices then give XWIS DecisionPoint a test drive.

As consultants we don’t often get to choose the technology for our clients but if asked I would recommend DecisionPoint when a interactive dashboard solution is needed.