Strategy customers can now leverage Distribution Services to fulfill many of the workflows previously handled by the legacy Narrowcast Server (NCS). Distribution Services is Strategy’s current tool for managing subscriptions and content delivery, ensuring that critical business insights are delivered to the right people at the right time.
Strategy continues to invest in Distribution Services, making sure it not only meets, but surpasses, the capabilities of the legacy Narrowcast Server, providing enhanced functionality and improved performance for most subscription workflows. You can migrate existing Narrowcast Server subscriptions to Distribution Services today using the Configuration Wizard, System Manager, or migrate from within Developer.
Parity and Enhancements in Distribution Services
Distribution Services was introduced as a replacement for Narrowcast Server starting with version 9.0. It is the subscription delivery tool of the Strategy ONE product suite and is installed among the Strategy ONE core components.
Supported Object Types:
- Content: All application objects including reports, dashboards, and documents.
- Schedules: Manage and automate data delivery schedules.
- Recipients: Users and groups.
Distribution Services offers enhanced functionality compared to Narrowcast Server while still maintaining support for many of the same features provided by Narrowcast Server.
Job Execution and Reuse:
- Distribution Services continues to offer single job execution against Intelligence Server for identical prompts and reuse of executed jobs within the same segment.
Customizable and Flexible Delivery Options:
- Distribution Services continues to facilitate bursting to email and files, delivering to Linux and Windows file system locations.
- With Distribution Services, you can still compress contents in a zip file, deliver data via email, and deliver Reports and Documents in Excel, HTML and PDF formats.
- Multiple attachments in a single email continue to be supported.
- Distribution Services allows including report filters in HTML and PDF deliveries, and report names and filters in Excel deliveries. Web users can control additional information included in PDF deliveries and add footers and extra information to reports (Excel, CSV, Plain Text).
- With Distribution Services, you can custom names for files and zip files.
Error Handling:
- Distribution Services supports error handling for no data and partial results.
Language and Time Zone Preferences:
- Like Narrowcast Server, Distribution Services supports setting number and date format preferences. It also allows setting language preferences for metadata, data, and Intelligence Server at the user, project and machine level.
- With Distribution Services, the Intelligence Server uses the operating system’s time zone from the server machine.
Scheduling and Distribution Management:
- Distribution Services continues to support time-triggered schedules, and also supports event-triggered schedules.
- Work can continue to be distributed across multiple machines.
- Distribution Services supports recipient control (To, CC, BCC) and self-subscription. With Distribution Services, recipients can change their delivery settings and can unsubscribe. Recipients can also subscribe other users, contacts, and contact groups with their security applied at message generation.
- Start and end date settings are maintained in Distribution Services.
- With Distribution Services, you can continue to control database instance information.
Strategy is committed to continuing to enhance Distribution Services to support most legacy Narrowcast Server workflows. Strategy has planned enhancements to the product, including, but not limited to the ability to:
- Customize subject and body text by inserting dynamic data from reports’ attributes and metrics.
- Embed dynamic content from dashboards in the body of the e-mail
- Use pre-formatted Excel templates to generate attachments for e-mail and file subscriptions.
- Deliver messages with multiple attachments to a dynamic recipient list.
- Allow bursting subscriptions for dashboards.
For more information on transitioning from Narrowcast Server to Distribution Services, please contact your account team or MicroStrategy Support.
