Now that you have a good overview of the powerful features of the new Analytics module in AgilePoint NX 8.0, let’s dive a little deeper into the report designer features and user experience. The first thing you will notice is the seamless experience the Analytics module presents to self-service BI users.

In the report builder, the user can view the list of all the reports he/she has access to and also create new reports, based on granted permissions. The user can also save the report as a template for reuse.

Business users may typically look into dozens of reports to gain insights for decision making. To simplify this process, the reports can now be clustered into categories and sub-categories. A wizard-driven menu has been made available to cater to both a citizen developer for self-service BI and a professional developer for advanced reports. For a citizen developer, the report development is via drag-drop-configure and select-configure, thus not requiring the knowledge of writing in Structured Query Language (SQL) and writing code for athematic operations.

One of the best parts of the report designer is the live-preview feature, which executes the queries, applies the sorting, filters, does the computations, shows the layout, font, formatting and lots more so that the developer is clear on how the end report will look.,A powerful feature provided by the reports is the ability to interconnect the individual charts. The report consists of various elements such as charts, gauges, grids, maps, and form. These components can be interconnected so that when drill down or selection is done for one chart, the same gets automatically reflected on the others.

Finally, let’s discuss access rights management. Firstly, the report can be shared with all users in AgilePoint NX, one or more selected AgilePoint NX users, and/or one or more AgilePoint NX roles. Second, the type of sharing can be granularly defined. These include full access, quick edit (for citizen developer), save as (same as full access but cannot edit the original), locked (view only without filter interactions), view only (same a locked but filter interaction is allowed), and no access. Now watch this short video overview of the key features for the new report designing experience.