We are using BO XI Enterprise SP7 R2 and are looking at BOD as a way to add some oomph to our charting.
I’m not sure how to go about checking on costs. The idea is that 2 users would use the tool to create dashboards that provide ad-hoc capabilities and that these dashboards would then be made available to other users on our network. Ideally users would be able to access the reports and enjoy full ad-hoc, drill down and drill through capabilities through Sharepoint 2010.
Is this similar to your scenario? Does every user need an instance of BOD running on their client to access reports?
Can reports be exported to excel with full fidelity and interacted with by users without having BOD installed?
You will only need to buy the Dashboards licenses for the developers.
Once a dashboard is developed, it is deployed as a SWF (Flash) file. That file can be used by anyone without a license.
For click-through capability into a report, the user will need a license for BOXI. They do not need any software installed locally, other than the basic browser and Java.
Reports can be exported into Excel with a high degree of fidelity. There are some formatting options and objects (primarily images) which do not export well. Note that dashboards cannot be exported to Excel (though a Google search will turn up some Java code for exporting the underlying data to a CSV file).
Also, as a note, you need to actually look at the Xcelsius product (the forerunner to BOD) if you are still on BOXI R2.
Exactly what we do here. I set up xcelsius dashboards and deploy as hmtl to our intranet. These show high-level aggregated data. There are Bobj webi reports linked that take user parameters and run webi report using those parameters to produce lower level data for users who have access to Bobj.
Thanks for your reply! Based on what you are saying it would appear that I may not need to deploy the Xcelsius reports as Flash files at all? It would be really nice if we could avoid that!
(BOB member since 2014-06-25)
(BOB member since 2005-03-01)