blackhawk wrote:I am curious to know how many people are interested in developing web-based applications around their TM1 solutions. By this, I mean, is there a real need out there to create more customized and guided applications for your users, or do you find that you can do everything you need today and they are happy with how the information is presented?
Happy with how the information is presented???
In Web????
You're {bleep}in' me, right?
No, seriously I think that presentation is fine in Excel, provided that your users can and will use Excel. And for management accountants and the like, Excel really is the way to go.
However for dashboarding (etc) for senior management, directors, roadshow presentations to investors and the like, a web presentation is what's expected these days. But the problem with Web is that it is just so, for want of a better term, crude.
For such presentations, you can't just assign access to views and say "Hey, here you go, drill down to your heart's content", you really need to be able to define the reports so that the audience sees what's relevant without needing to understand the chart of accounts or the products hierarchy or other dimension structures. That means websheets as things stand.
Oh, but the websheets! The fonts are frequently jaggy if you go above about 10 points (as with headings), the column widths that you need bear little relationship to what you saw in Excel, the charts look like they were drawn with a crayon, the action buttons are all but impossible to work with when they're in hyperlink format since they become invisible in edit mode which means that despite your best efforts their alignment is often just a smidge "off", you can't put in hyperlinks to .pdf documents unless they're hosted on an actual web server somewhere (not in the Applications folders), inserted graphics need to be in .png format (an issue not mentioned in any of the manuals) if you want them to avoid looking like they've been through a blender... it's just not a good look. And that's in IE. Don't go there in FireFox.
Then you have issues like the fact that you can't activate or deactivate the navigation tree (or part thereof) on a user by user basis but instead have to do it on a global basis (an utterly appalling design decision), and the speed issue if a websheet is too large... you'll find a bunch of these issues if you search back through past postings.
Yes, I know that some say "Use EV" but frankly EV has issues of its own which let's not go into here.
I guess the dream (or mine anyway) would be to be able to generate DHTML content in something like Dreamweaver and have an easy (well, relatively easy) way of doing a link to a TM1 back end to get the latest numbers. That would give you access to the full array of web presentation options beyond the data itself. Want to embed a Flash video clip from the CEO? You could do that. Want to have standard .jpgs which won't get distorted? You could do that. Want to have .pdfs hosted on the local server that the viewer can open? You could do that. Want numbers on screen that don't look like they were generated by a dot matrix printer? You betcha.
I understand that Web needed to be designed to do many things from presentation to data entry to allowing views to be manipulated with a zero footprint (unlike EV, where you do need to add further software to get the browser to use it or did with the last version that I looked at), and I wouldn't disparage the amount of effort that had to be put in to get it to do that. The problem with Web, IMHO, is that while it can do those many things... it does none of them exceptionally well, and the presentation limitations are the most pointed example of this.