Benefits
Open Architecture
The subject of globalization is not new or unique at this point of business applications development cycle. With the workforce consistently expanding and shifting across the globe, being able to seamlessly support languages, currencies, cultural nuances of colors, icons, and fonts is essential for information visualization strategy. In order to provide capabilities to offer same levels of functionality regardless of business users’ location the business logic will be separated from the textual and formatting descriptors. These descriptors are being maintained as XML files and automatically loaded during run-time.
Other common requirements associated with global enterprises demand that same components are gracefully deployed in various container frameworks depending on local or national standards or IT policies. These may include varieties of commercial, open source, or internally developed container frameworks.
This seamless interoperability among various technologies, vendors, and specification provides a truly open architecture of the Dashboard component.
Mashup
Since the Dashboard and gadgets will be used by the enterprise users, it is necessary to enable capabilities of application functionality and information integration, also known as mashups. These various mashup activities will take place in collaboration with the business analysts and subject matter experts intimately familiar with the tasks and activities that the dashboard is seeking to enable and optimize.
Multiple components will be integrated into workspaces, drawing from various data sources, reporting and business intelligence applications, internal and external web services, content management systems, and other sources of unstructured content.
Federated Development
It is essential for any enterprise to realize the amount of investment that has been put into development of various existing applications, business services, data warehouse and business intelligence capabilities. One of the main business benefits of the Dashboard is the ability to house these independent components and allow event level communications and context exchange by other gadgets or the Dashboard itself.
These various hosted components may be internally developed using contemporary languages such as Java, .Net (Visual Basic or C#), HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flex or Flash. Regardless of the original technology, these components will be able to interact with the Dashboard and among themselves utilizing standard messaging protocols.
Moreover, independent development teams familiar with these technologies may continue their existing projects and processes without interruption or degradation of productivity. The common Dashboard will act as the governance process to manage quality, interoperability, and performance of these various applications.
Centralized Administration
Another key feature of the Dashboard is its ability to offer centralized administration of various aspects of the system even if the system itself is distributed for the purposes of scalability and availability.
The Administrative Console offers management of various global settings, entitlements for the gadgets, pre-assembly of the workspaces, and initial look and feel that will be configured for the users by administrators. Additional customization and personalization will be available at the users' discretion.