Jaspersoft, a provider of business intelligence software today announced the general availability of Jaspersoft 4, a complete commercial open source BI suite designed for web applications.
Jaspersoft 4 leverages a new modular UI architecture to deliver a best-in-class environment for building and deploying BI. By separating the content and presentation layers in line with today's web application standards, Jaspersoft 4 aims to accelerate the process of bringing BI to users. Featuring a new GUI for rich visual dashboarding and self-service features, this latest release of the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite is intended to overcome traditional barriers to adoption of BI, the company says.
There continues to be a challenge around BI adoption, Mike Boyarski, senior product marketing manager at Jaspersoft, tells 5 Minute Briefing. This challenge has led to the emergence of "BI Builders," who are tasked with incorporating BI seamlessly into the everyday applications and processes of their users, the company says. Jaspersoft 4 builds on the open, standards-based architecture of the Jaspersoft BI Suite to provide the BI Builder with user interface flexibility to quickly deliver BI that drives pervasive user adoption.
The new UI Framework within Jaspersoft 4 delivers the improved interactivity and usability typically found in consumer web applications.
According to Boyarski, Jaspersoft 4 is the only BI environment that is 100% web application-ready. The new UI Framework completes Jaspersoft's architecture as a web application stack, from the back end server to the front end UI. Built on open web standards, Jaspersoft 4 can be deployed out-of-the-box on-premise, in a multi-tenant SaaS environment, or in the cloud. Article continues.
The Jaspersoft UI architecture separates the content and presentation layers to allow easy UI customization through simple markup changes in cascading style sheets (CSS), without impacting the underlying functionality. Customizations are automatically carried forward as new Jaspersoft versions are deployed. The UI framework enables fast creation of alternative UI themes for different users, different SaaS tenants and different devices. This capability also facilitates the integration of the Jaspersoft BI server within existing web applications.
The integrated or embedded approach helps avoid the current "tools-switching" that occurs in many organizations where a user has their CRM or HR application, but if they want to make a decision with data, they have to go to a different environment, go to a different tool, study that data, and then go back to their original applications, says Boyarski. "We think there is a bad way of doing operational decision making." The better way, he says, is to embed that environment into the context of their applications. By customizing the BI functionality into these application workspaces, the tools become more readily utilized, he notes.
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