MicroStrategy Introduces Major Enhancements to Mobile Platform
MicroStrategy Transaction Services helps companies build mobile apps that connect to back-end transactional systems, databases.
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MicroStrategy Incorporated announced the general availability of MicroStrategy 9.2.1. It features a new product, Transaction Services, that allows users to initiate actions and transactions from a mobile device. In addition, MicroStrategy 9.2.1 includes enhancements to mobile security and Visual Insight, which allows people to get the business answers they need quickly and without assistance from their information technology teams. These innovations will significantly extend the ability for companies to run their businesses and communicate with customers on their mobile devices.
MicroStrategy Transaction Services is a new product that helps companies build mobile apps that connect to back-end transactional systems and databases. As an integral component of the MicroStrategy BI platform, Transaction Services allows mobile apps and Web-based dashboards to include action-taking features, including submitting orders, one-click approvals and denials, notes for tracking and directing business activity, and write-back to data sources. Using either SQL for database transactions or XML for Web services applications, thousands of user transactions are stored, triggering new business processes, reallocating resources, and accelerating business activity.
With MicroStrategy’s Web-based design tools and MicroStrategy Transaction Services, Transaction apps are easy to develop. No coding is needed to assemble app interfaces that enable data input. Users can design apps using a range of flexible input controls: text boxes, calendar and time pickers, sliders, on-off switches, and dropdown lists. App designs are stored in MicroStrategy’s metadata repository and are accessible via Web-based editors. A separate transaction report manages the write-back, allowing it to be reused in multiple mobile apps. Furthermore, MicroStrategy’s simple, click-to-configure application assembly enables companies to build mobile front-ends to existing transactional applications that may have little or no BI content.
Distribute Multimedia Content on Mobile Devices
To embrace mobile apps as new information channels, organizations are embedding multimedia into mobile apps. Companies see the value of enriching their enterprise mobile apps with how-to videos, guides, and manuals to equip their mobile workforce with any type of information they need, and the tools to understand and act on that information. Companies are also using multimedia in mobile apps to deliver the latest promotional videos, commercials, and product endorsements directly onto their customers’ mobile devices.
MicroStrategy Mobile supports displaying videos, graphics, books, brochures, and Web content. A built-in PDF reader and in-app connections to e-mail and a browser allows users to return to the same place in the MicroStrategy app after viewing the multimedia content. Changes to content are automatically updated in the app without any need to compile and publish the app.
New Mobile Security Enhancements
The security of information transmitted and stored on mobile devices is of paramount importance. MicroStrategy 9.2.1 includes the following new security features for the iPad and iPhone:
Encryption: AES encryption is applied to data while in transit from Mobile Server to the MicroStrategy Mobile client as well as when stored on the mobile device.
Confidential Authentication Mode: Administrators can set apps to be confidential, which requires users to log onto the application when opening the application, as well as after a period of inactivity. User credentials are validated against the Mobile Server while online, and against locally cached and encrypted credentials while offline.
Authentication with a Certificate Server: Mobile clients can download a certificate used to authenticate the mobile device from a certificate server. This allows administrators to remotely revoke access requests from specific mobile devices.
Improvements to Visual Insight, New Data Visualization Features
Released in MicroStrategy 9.2 in March 2011, Visual Insight gives users a better way to analyze data that is simple, powerful, and fast. Data from across the enterprise, regardless of where it resides, can be accessed in Visual Insight, typically in less than 30 minutes. Insights buried in tabular data can be discovered by using highly interactive data visualizations, and without any support from IT teams. Additional graphs and charts make analyzing data sets of any type or size in a visual, interactive way even more powerful. Visual Insight analyses can now be viewed on an iPad.
Visual analysis continues to get more powerful as more visualizations are added and are available via the iPhone and iPad:
- Map visualization has improved network graphs, location markers, and bubble markers.
- New image viewer and photo uploader widgets are available on the iPad and iPhone.
- Improved user interactivity in the Time Series widget.
- New Heat Map visualization on the iPad includes gestures to analyze data.
- Graph Matrix widget on the iPad allows quick comparison of data in a table of charts.
With the enhancements in MicroStrategy 9.2.1, organizations can use MicroStrategy’s platform to build hundreds of different Mobile Apps and mobilize their business processes, marketing, sales channels, and business intelligence.
For more details about MicroStrategy Transaction Services, visit www.microstrategy.com/mobile/transactions/.