Yellowfin Updates Its Business Intelligence App
Business intelligence and analytics vendor Yellowfin has released the latest version of its BI software, Yellowfin 6.3, with an extended focus on collaboration.
One of the most significant enhancements is the addition of a timeline function that records users' specific activities and interactions within Yellowfin in real time to create a searchable, personalized, chronological catalogue of the particular movements of, and anything related to, each individual user within Yellowfin. Users can directly interact with each other and analytic content via their respective Timelines. Timelines are also configured to ensure data security. Users can set their Timeline to private, meaning other users can only access their Timeline upon request.
"The all-new Yellowfin Timeline encapsulates a user's relationship with Yellowfin in one place," said Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin, in a statement. "Timeline stimulates the type of user engagement, transparency, and communication required to instill an organizational culture of data-based decision-making and achieve BI ROI. We anticipate that, over time, Timeline will replace the dashboard as the default logon interface for most Yellowfin users."
Other enhancements and improvements within 6.3 focus on collaboration, usability, and data visualization.
In addition to the Timelines feature, other new collaborative features include the Discussion Module to simplify the process of engaging in dialogue with other users and linking BI content to those discussions.
The usability enhancements include the following:
- Dashboard Sub Tabs, enabling users to create multiple tabs within a single dashboard tab. Sub Tabs allow users to group content together by passing filters, between tabs, across dashboards.
- Dashboard Help, which helps users understand how to use key features of a Yellowfin dashboard via informational pop-ups. Pop-ups appear over key dashboard elements and explain their purpose and usefulness.
- Confirm Edit Message, a pop-up notification that activates when a user attempts to edit or delete BI content, including reports, dashboards, and discussion groups. This addition lets users understand the impact that any alterations made to BI content would have on specific users and user groups, allowing them to communicate any changes, or intended changes, to affected persons.
The data visualization additions and improvements include the following:
- Brushing, which enables users to select or exclude data points on a chart. Users can point, click, and drag to highlight the area of data they want to eliminate from their data set or isolate and explore in greater detail.
- Colored Metrics for Series Selection, which allow users to assign specific colors to each metric.
- Report Summaries that encapsulate the key metrics and trends within a report, displayed as mini KPI charts along the top of a report.
Yellowfin also released a new HTML 5 mobile BI application for Android devices. This latest application replaces Yellowfin's original native Android app, released in February 2011. The application is available for free download from the Android Marketplace.
"Yellowfin 6.3 delivers our customers the most immersive and social analytics experience available on the market today," Rabie said. "We understand that the best decisions are not only fact-based but are derived with input from multiple people. We know that collaborative BI has the capacity to promote easier knowledge sharing and therefore better, faster decision-making."