Announcing BITeamwork 2.4 - A Game Changing Release

We've released one of our most feature-rich version of BITeamwork to date.  Version 2.4 is excellent and provides a lot of items we believe will charm BI users into infatuation with Collaborative and Social BI in the enterprise.

New Features in BITeamwork 2.4

Feature requests collected from existing BITeamwork customers and developers reviewing the product have been taken into account and prioritized.  Yes, that's right, we are actually taking feature requests.

 We've incorporated some of the low hanging fruit and some fairly robust functionality that just makes sense for Collaborative BI.

Security Control

Who would have thought that if a BI Analyst or CEO wanted to create a comment that they would only want certain people to see that comment?  Granular security control is now part of all comments.  A simple interface is exposed when you click the security icon next to the Assign To label proving the comment creator with the ability to add privileged users or application roles to view the comment.

Prompt Context

We've hit the nail on the head with this one.  Comments are now context sensitive at the write-review authoring of a comment.  This means that if a user wanted to specify a single cell comment on a dashboard pivot table for the year prompt (2013) and month prompt (Feb), this is now possible. This is different from bookmarking, saved selections, and general dashboard state an provides an amazing set of new possibilities for accuracy of commenting and annotating in OBIEE.

 Social BI Comment Voting

Oracle Business Intelligence is now social. The idea of socializing ideas via "voting" or "liking" the input of our peers is now part of BITeamwork. The proven concept by the likes of FaceBook, Salesforce.com, and other social networks which has resonated so viametely with millions of individuals on a global scale has been integrated into Oracle BI 11g.   

Each main comment now includes a Vote button.  By clicking the vote button the comment is ranked and its approval aggregated on the "Home" page along with the other Recent Items and Popular Items shown to users.  In one of the next releases BITeamwork will provide a 3rd party widget which will allow an organization to place the socially voted comments on any portal such as MS Sharepoint or Oracle WebCenter in order to link back to the Oracle BI portal from which the comment(s) originate.

Sprechen Sie Spanish, Norweigan, or Polish?

We've increased the localization capabilities of BITeamwork to fulfill the expanding global interest seen in countries outside of the US for BITeamwork. Spanish, Norweigan, and Polish languages are now localized in BITeamwork. This seamlessly provides continuity between Oracle BI implementations in those countries and BITeamwork. We are proud of an internal project called BabelCow that allows us the flexibility to accelerate our localization generation process.

Administration Controls

The BITeamwork control panel in the OBIEE Administration page and its tabbing system which organizes the out of the box OBIEE administration features has worked very well for a nice intuitive navigation of the system.  We are constantly asking ourselves what else can we add here to made administering OBIEE easier and providing real value to customers. We've got plenty of great ideas that are in the works but for BITeamwork 2.4 for we kept it simple.

• Maintenance Mode - We actually "fixed" or finally have this feature working in the BITeamwork taking concepts from SalesForce.com.  This function allows the administrator to deterministically (i.e.: either on or off), notify users upon entering the OBIEE portal that the OBIEE is undergoing maintenance.  A user reads the maintenance mode message and acknowledges their understanding by clicking and acceptance button.  They are no longer shown the maintenance mode screen for the remainder of their visit. And, when the administrators are done with their operations, maintenance mode can simply be turned of in the BITeamwork control panel.
• Administration Page Information Area -  This very annoying native information panel is nice to have but is always opened / expanded upon entering the Administration Page.  So, we've changed that so that it is always closed unless you choose to expand it.
• Admin Page Pop Out - Remember in Oracle BI 10g when you clicked on the Administration link from the Global Header, that the Admin Page appeared in a popup window?  Yes, so do we.  That's why this is now an option in BITeamwork.  Just set this to true, refresh the browser, and every time thereafter when you click the Administration link it opens in a new perfectly sized window so you can continue doing what you were doing in your other OBIEE window.  When you want to stop the pop window just set the option back to false.
• OBIEE Configuration File Reader - Just to revisit this feature which allows users to read the OBIEE configuration files without having to log in or FTP to the actual OBIEE server just to get a glance at a configuration setting. This is ideal for GUID refreshing and verifying performance configuration changes. 

If your company or team is interested in enhancing your Oracle BI experience and user adoption please download BITeamwork today from BITeamwork.com. We think BITeamwork and the Collaborative BI features it brings provides a unique value proposition beyond just leaving comments; although it's great at that too.

Read the full blog post at, http://www.artofbi.com/announcing-biteamwork-2-4-engelbart-a-must-see-release/