Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

If you have not checked it yet,

“IT Dashboard” is a new, one-stop clearinghouse of information that allows anyone with a web browser to track federal IT initiatives and hold the government accountable for progress and results. A part of USASpending.gov, the dashboard allows you to see what IT projects are working and on-schedule (and which are not), offer alternative approaches, and provide direct feedback to the chief information officers at federal agencies – in effect, keeping tabs on the people who are responsible for taxpayer dollars for technology.”

IT Dashboard tracks government spending and you can check it online at http://usaspending.gov

There is way to get your own customized version of the dashboard at

http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/data-feeds

Search results are very dynamic. They jump around everyday as new content is added and as new websites are added.

I don’t normally use Yahoo for my search needs but today I happened to casually google search for Dashboards on Yahoo and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

Yep, InfoCaptor is one of the top three dashboards that show up on Yahoo, just behind Cognos!

It would be a real party time when it happens on Google

Thermometer in Dashboard

To create this chart, your SQL should return only one column and one row

select sum(quantity_sold) as qty_sold
from [detail_data$]
where fiscal_year = 2001
and country_region like ‘Americas’

(Complete Steps) Create Thermometers in Dashboard

Tags: thermometer chart, dashboard thermometer, dashboard gauges, jfreechart thermometer

One of the new features available in the upcoming release of InfoCaptor is the ability to auto-refresh multiple dashboards and automatically cycle through each dashboard.

You can set the cycle rate by clicking on the options button, click on the “Auto Refresh & Cycle Each Dashboard” checkbox and select the refresh rate at the desired number of seconds.

Issues: Currently if the refresh rate is set very low, Java is not able to trigger the Garbage collection and hence it creeps memory and eventually the application becomes un-responsive.

Ideally if the refresh rate is set to 2-3 minutes then it should run fine on a good machine. Ocassionally you may need to restart InfoCaptor if it starts slowing down.

Along with this we are also working on launching multiple dashboards at once using a common config file. This should go handy with the Auto-refresh and cycling option.

You can test drive the auto-cycle option using this test version

What are the benefits of this feature?

We already have had the auto-refresh feature, and auto-cycling of dashboards during refresh is a natural extension of the feature. We have numerous users and clients asked for the cycling feature so that a DBA or Sysadmin person can setup a dedicated desktop just to monitor the metrics. If the metrics are corporate goal specific then they could also be broadcasted over a TV or a huge display for employee awareness.

Tags: dashboard on tv, tv dashboards, auto refresh dashboards, auto cycle dashboards

You can now generated technical document for each and every MySQL database object. The MySQL dashboard is designed using information_schema views and SHOW commands. You can generate complete documentation from Mysql data-dictionary by just click of one single button.
Here are some screenshots of the dashboard.

Here is the screenshot of the pdf document

Almost all the dashboards in the market can be categorized as “Lazy Dashboards”. Why? To see the information, you have to click on refresh or the “go” button.

InfoCaptor is going to become one of the first non-lazy dashboards. Based on user requirements and lot of thoughts, it will soon have the feature to refresh the contents automatically at certain present interval.

There are few benefits of this feature, for e.g one of my users is having the need to display dashboards on big televisions where everybody can glance at the numbers and charts as they walk by. In this situation, you definitely need the dashboards to refresh automatically.

InfoCaptor will have the ability to set the time interval in seconds in order to meet some of those demanding situations.

This is really getting cutting-edge….more about this later once it is eventually released!

A typical business starts by maintaining all its information in variety of different formats. Information may reside on a personal database on your local machine or on a centralized server. It could reside on an Access database or just plain Excel spreadsheet.

You may be storing your finance information on SQL server and some inventory information on a MySQL or Access database.

So how do you access information from all these heterogeneous databases?

One way would be to somehow get all the necessary information on one page as a starting point (like a portal). From this page, you could drill into details or jump from one database to another and get information as you need.

InfoCaptor makes this process very easy for you. It connects to any database and you can link information from different databases on one common page or view. For e.g. you can link your Finance information from SQL server to the Inventory information on MySQL. You can view summary information in small windows (portlets), drill into details and view charts and graphs.

It also allows you to create beautiful reports in PDF and HTML, perfect for presentation and publishing them on your website.

You can export information into Excel, CSV, PDF and HTML.

InfoCaptor is perfect to do Ad-hoc Dashboards, Reports and create beautiful Documentation. It is an ideal tool to provide valuable Intelligence for your business.

For more information & to download the evaluation copy, visit http://www.InfoCaptor.com
Email: contact@infocaptor.com
Tel: 720-235-6344
Chat: (yahoo) infocaptor, (AIM) infocaptor

In the latest update, InfoCaptor will have anti-aliasing for the font display. The jinternalframes that holds all the portlets(qlet, plet, glet and blet) will no longer have the outer border. This is done to make it appear more embedded to the page rather than having a ‘Coming out of page’ look.

Also, there is a slight change in the directory access structure. Initially it used to try to access the user’s home directories which would be “My documents” but this is changed to access the current working directory and that would be where InfoCaptor is installed. Many corporate users do not have admin rights to certain directories and this option will try to eliminate such issues.

In the latest coming update, InfoCaptor will start saving the last accessed directory, a much needed feature

The latest build will be uploaded this weekend.

InfoCaptor can be installed on your PC or you can access it through your webserver. In order to access it from webserver, there are few steps need to take place. First is to sign the jar and place the appropriate files on the webserver. And then all you have to do is launch the URL. Here is an example http://www.infocaptor.com/demo.php