Yellowfin Release 3.3 Announcement
Yellowfin is delighted to announce the content for our upcoming release 3.3. Scheduled for release end of November 2007, Yellowfin 3.3 will bring further ease of use to reporting and analytics for both embedded and stand alone reporting users. Release 3.3 will certainly improve the ability to interact with, and visualise your data. This will be achieved through greater flexibility and functionality in dashboard design, report grouping and general formatting. Naturally additional administrative features will make Yellowfin even easier to maintain and embed into 3rd party applications.
Although we wish we could say these changes were solely our idea – we can’t! A lot of this release is a result of the fantastic advice we have received from partners and clients. If you wish to influence the next release then the taking part in the Beacon survey is your chance to shape what actually gets done! So if you were one of the many that completed the latest survey – then thanks (if not then there is always next time). Some of the improvements scheduled are listed below. This is not an exhaustive list but will provide you with a taste of what is to come.
- A range of formatting improvements that will assist you to better visualise your data. This will include changes such as report summaries with hyperlinks to sections, additional format options for tables and columns. There will also be additional functionality for charting with extended interaction capability – stretching your expectations of what can be achieved via pure HTML delivery.
- Additional integration options will provide you with even more flexibility for the deployment of Yellowfin into 3rd party applications or intranet environments. It may seem like boring old infrastructure but these changes will further speed up your deployment or time to market activities.
- Users do not just read reports in isolation – they tend to browse a range of subject specific reports within the context of the work they are doing at the time. As such Yellowfin will be adding greater flexibility to its dashboards – providing you the capacity for linking reports together associated reports to provider deeper insight – that lets users link a series of reports together into a tabbed format.
- Improved Freehand SQL – 3.2 already provided a full range of formatting options but 3.3 extends this with Source Filter Security, User Prompting and Advanced Functions providing the flexibility to author highly interactive reports quickly via your own SQL statements.
- Enhancements to the Yellowfin View Builder which will greatly improve the usability and functionality of this process. No one loves Meta-data that much we understand – and we will keep trying to make this as easy as possible.
- Introducing Broadcast and Schedule Administration – providing Yellowfin Administrators with total visibility of all scheduled jobs which they can manage to minimise redundant jobs being run.
This release builds on the fantastic achievements of 3.2. Our focus continues to be on improving data visualisation (without sacrificing ease of use) and assisting our OEM partners to deliver excellence in embedded BI solutions. We are very excited about the functionality that is to be delivered in this release.
We do not want to stop at 3.3 and we value your feedback; so don’t just wait for the next Beacon survey to have your say. Log into the Yellowfin forum at http://forum.yellowfin.com.au and you can contribute to the Beacon Wish list at any time. All good ideas will find their way into the next survey, and future releases.