MicroStrategy® Incorporated, a worldwide provider of enterprise analytics and mobility software, announced the general availability of MicroStrategy 10.9, the newest feature release to the company’s MicroStrategy 10™ platform.
This feature release introduces Dossier, a new storybook experience for everyone across the enterprise that makes it easy to consume, share, and collaborate around analytics. To learn more about the new features in MicroStrategy 10.9, visit our What’s New in MicroStrategy page.
“MicroStrategy 10.9 represents the biggest leap forward since our MicroStrategy 10 platform launch and underscores our vision of delivering ‘Intelligence Everywhere’,” said Tim Lang, senior executive vice president and chief technology officer, MicroStrategy Incorporated.
“We believe collaborative analytics accelerates the velocity of decision making. That’s why we’re introducing Dossier, an easier and faster method of consuming analytics that we believe end users are going to love. MicroStrategy 10.9 empowers users to do more with their analytics regardless of their technical skill or role.”
Dossier delivers new storybook experience around analytics
MicroStrategy 10.9 delivers Dossier, an interactive book of business which combines relevant analytics into a single place, organised into chapters and pages. The new streamlined interface goes beyond dashboards and brings data together in a format that all users recognise and understand. The new consumer-oriented and browser-based interface offers end users a modern and interactive means to explore data. Dossier makes it easy to navigate and share reports and visualisations that matter to users.
“Assisting customers in improving their businesses through media-centric analytics insights is a top objective at Imagine, and MicroStrategy 10.9 is instrumental in helping us achieve this goal,” said Adam Gotlieb, director of Product Management for Global Traffic, Imagine Communications. “Dossier introduces a new streamlined interface that goes beyond dashboards and brings key data into a format that users can understand and use to make better, actionable decisions and identify new opportunities.”
Collaborative analytics Turbocharges decision making
Version 10.9 enables users to collaborate via discussion threads and real-time comments within the Dossier interface. Anyone who has access to a dossier through the MicroStrategy Library™ can ask questions, highlight trends, and share their current filter state with others. Users who are tagged in a comment can receive real-time notifications via email, browser banners, page and library alerts, or push notifications.
MicroStrategy library helps users quickly and easily find content and answers
The 10.9 release delivers the MicroStrategy Library, a personalised portal for all users to access their BI content and dossiers. End users can login to the MicroStrategy Library to find a list of all dossiers to which he or she has subscribed or has access. Each dossier in the library is represented by a customised thumbnail image, making it easy to visually identify content.
Additionally, powerful search options are available for users to find content quickly. New notifications and comments made to the user will show up clearly as an alert, so the user doesn’t miss an update. Regardless of what browser or mobile device a user is on, the MicroStrategy Library is responsive in design and will automatically resize as needed.
Visual-based filtering accelerates data exploration
Dossier delivers a completely revamped approach to filtering data. Users can explore their data with a clean, simple interface and multiple filter types, including visual filters, advanced qualification filters, and in-canvas selectors. With visual filters, users can now embed any MicroStrategy visualisation into the filter panel of a dossier, providing a visual and intuitive way to filter information without taking up valuable screen real estate.
Redesigned data discovery & dossier authoring facilitate faster access to data and insights
MicroStrategy 10.9 makes it easier for users to access, analyse, and operationalise their data. MicroStrategy 10.9 provides business analysts with more connectors to data sources, easier data preparation, visual analytics and guided advanced analytics. Analysts can author once and deploy on multiple devices, without worrying about the target device.
Dossier and document certification maintain effective data governance
A common need for organisations that have invested in self-service strategies is the ability to ensure that everyone is able to differentiate content that is tied to certified versus untrustworthy data. With MicroStrategy 10.9, analysts and data stewards can watermark content with a ‘certified’ stamp. This step offers an easy way to implement governance across a self-service deployment and makes it clear for business users which content is tied to trusted data sources.
New connectivity, including enhanced out-of-the-box connectors, to diverse types of data
MicroStrategy 10.9 amplifies existing investments by keeping up with the latest certifications and providing instant access to nearly any type of data with out-of-the-box connectors to popular data sources, including personal spreadsheets, enterprise data warehouses, text files, cloud sources, and big data systems. With a clean simple interface, analysts can sort through 80+ data sources to quickly find the source they need. Version 10.9 delivers live data access for Hadoop Gateway, allowing end users to get the latest information from HDFS.
In addition, MicroStrategy 10.9 delivers an SDK to build out new out-of-the-box connectors that help analysts visualise text and semi-structured data such as Solr, Box, One Drive, Elasticsearch and many others. These new connectors allow analysts and citizen data scientists to run queries against semi-structured data, like log files and text scripts.
Data is available to end users in tabular format and can be readily used to build reports or dossiers. New connectors built using the Data Connector API are regularly available and can be downloaded by visiting the MicroStrategy Community.
Greater flexibility to create custom MDX queries for advanced financial reporting
MicroStrategy 10.9 enables business users and analysts to visualise and interact with multi-level or ragged hierarchy reports against MDX sources, and delivers enhancements with dynamic filtering, persisted sort order, efficiency improvements, and support for derived attributes and metrics. Business users can now apply mathematical and other transformational functions, and create derived elements within hierarchy reports using more complex formulas and calculations.
New embedding APIs easily integrate dossiers into websites, blogs and portals
Offering a vast array of APIs, MicroStrategy 10 is an open platform that works with larger technology ecosystems and offers easy ways to extend its capabilities. With MicroStrategy 10.9’s new embedding APIs, dossiers can be easily embedded into third-party applications with the ability to interact with MicroStrategy content and associated functionality.
Users can slice and dice the data, navigate to different pages and chapters in the dossier, apply filters, and interact and analyse the data within the application itself. In addition, single sign-on or guest embedding can be enabled, so the user can interact with the dossier without having to login within the third-party application.
“After testing MicroStrategy 10.9 as an early adopter, we are excited about the new set of APIs in the release that will make embedding and integration of MicroStrategy capabilities with applications of our choice easier,” said Praphul Kumar, senior director of Product Management, Genesys. “As we create the world’s most powerful, personal and intelligent customer experiences, MicroStrategy helps us to democratise those experiences through their rich set of APIs.
We use MicroStrategy APIs to embed real-time and historical information right into the hands of contact center agents and supervisors so they can view and analyse that information in any application. MicroStrategy is the most open platform in the market, and we are excited to build more data-driven client applications with the new APIs.”
Upgrades to MicroStrategy on AWS strengthen analytics in the cloud
MicroStrategy on AWS allows organisations to deploy and manage enterprise analytics environments through the provisioning console. MicroStrategy 10.9 adds significant enhancements to its cloud offering, including single-click hotfix upgrades and the ability to deploy MicroStrategy into existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) accounts. New deployments will be automatically launched in the latest R4 instances that are optimised to require less memory.
MicroStrategy customers can deploy MicroStrategy on AWS in data centers in eight different locations: Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Sydney, and Tokyo. The MicroStrategy on AWS provisioning tool is also available in nine different languages: English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
The latest release also introduces various additional enhancements, including:
- Responsive design that makes it easier than ever to build and deploy analytics across different device types and screen sizes;
- New and improved data connectors that allow organisations to access datasets across different projects in a MicroStrategy deployment. Version 10.9 also certifies the latest data sources, including Maria Database 10.x, Apache Hive 2.x, Spark SQL 2.0, and MapR 5.2, and delivers improvements to data connectors for Presto, Snowflake, and Amazon Redshift; and
- Out-of-the-box connectors for both Solr and Elasticsearch.
Release of MicroStrategy 10.4™ Hotfix 5
Alongside the MicroStrategy 10.9 feature release, MicroStrategy 10.4 Hotfix 5 is generally available to customers today. This hotfix improves overall product stability and includes over 200 customer-reported enhancements and fixes across the platform.
Furthermore, this latest update to the MicroStrategy platform release provides driver and feature parity for relational and big data gateways with the latest MicroStrategy feature release (10.9). This enables access to brand-new data sources and provides optimised connectors for additional data sources — allowing customers to expand and enhance their existing applications. The latest hotfix (10.4.5) is also available for MicroStrategy on AWS.
MicroStrategy customers can apply MicroStrategy 10.9 or 10.4.5 to their analytics environments today by downloading the new release from theMicroStrategy download site. To see MicroStrategy 10.9 in action, attend our upcoming global Symposium Series, or register for our “MicroStrategy 10.9 and Dossier: Collaborative business analytics that boost adoption” webcast, taking place on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, at 2:00 p.m. EDT.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @ VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus
