Starting with the release of Strategy ONE (March 2024), dossiers are also known as dashboards.
With 10.9, Strategy introduced the next generation client interface for consumption of dashboards and documents – Strategy Library. This represents the biggest leap in client side technology in the past few years. With this simple, modern and highly responsive paradigm, it makes it much easier to build and consume dashboards for the widest audience of end users. To achieve this, some key new capabilities were added that make it easier to author, read, interact and collaborate on dashboards without any formal training. With this release, the erstwhile Strategy dashboards are now interactive, social stories. We call these interactive, social stories - Dossiers.
For a deeper look into the value proposition of dossiers vis-à-vis dashboards, we highly recommend browsing through Dossiers: Going beyond Dashboards.
So what does this mean for any other existing Strategy Content, especially, Report Services Documents? Also, how do Report Services Documents benefit from the workflows and capabilities added via Library for Dossiers?
Report Services Documents in 10.9 and 10.10
First up, Report Services Documents (or just “documents”) continue to remain an essential part of the Strategy portfolio. While dossiers are a great proposition when self-service, collaboration, responsive design, and fast content creation are key requirements; documents are still your best choice when you need the ability to build highly customized, pixel perfect reports, or applications with transaction services. With Strategy 10.9 and 10.10, continued investments have been made to the documents portfolio with enhancements, bug fixes and performance improvements across the board.
Strategy Library and Report Services Documents
In addition to the enhancements in 10.9 and 10.10, Strategy provides a brand new way of collating and consuming documents via the Library. As we will discuss in the next few sections, consuming documents via the Library opens up a brand new dimension of workflows for document, while maintaining the rich features and capabilities that they are traditionally known and used for.
1. The Library: Simpler and Faster access to your documents
The Strategy Library provides users with a simple, personalized space that can contain all of the documents they care about most. It uses a tile based experience with search and collaboration capabilities that are particularly suited to the large number of information consumers and business users in most organizations.
A key benefit of collating your documents via the Library is that one can see all documents across all projects on a Strategy Intelligence Server in one place, as opposed to the traditional folder browsing paradigms (where objects exist within their respective projects and folders) or other complex custom navigation workflows. It resembles a library of books, if you will, where the books are replaced by the documents you use the most.
2. Cover Pages: Visual cues to find your documents faster
Same as dossiers, Report Services Documents can be assigned visually rich cover pages to distinguish them from documents and dossiers within the Library. Currently (10.10), this is possible via WorkStation.
The cover pages not only provide simple visual cues to get to your content faster, but can also be used for branding and standardization purposes. A good cover page sometimes does away the need of writing detailed descriptions or finding other creative ways to separate content from each other, and helps make content stand out much more easily.
3. Certification and trust
Same as dossiers, documents can also be certified.
As users build their own content, have their own versions of content, and generally do self-service analytics - the amount of content in the system grows significantly. On one hand, this is a great thing and should be encouraged (since it means that more people are taking advantage of analytics to drive their business forward). On the other hand, the increased volume of content can make it difficult for users to figure out what content they can trust. With 10.9, we have added a capability to the system so that users with an appropriate privilege can ‘certify’ content (dossiers, documents and data sets). This indicates to the end users that the content has been approved by an expert with authority.
4. Quick Search bar: Faster and Easier Search
Documents can also leverage the quick search bar that powers the Library.
The improved advanced search bar design provides users the ability to easily find and pull search results across dossier name, chapter, page names, etc. for dossiers. Since documents do not have the concept of chapters and pages, currently, documents can be searched by name on Library. Advanced search capabilities including searching on attribute and metric names are not available for now. This search is powered by a brand new search engine that is faster and more efficient than the search interfaces Strategy has traditionally had in the past.
5.Table of Contents (ToC): Simpler navigation paradigm
Same as dossiers, all layouts get converted to Chapters in documents. However, panels do not get converted to pages and continue to render the same way as before.
The ToC provides a unified, simple navigation paradigm so that any end user can read and interact with a dossier without prior training. Instead of the cluttered tab representation for layouts, ToC provide an easy way to organize your content and tell a story. It also bypasses the need for creating custom navigation workflows within your document. The ToC is abstracted from the simple concept of books and makes navigation within the RSD simpler and intuitive.
6. Real Time Collaboration: From simple documents to collaborative analytics
Documents can now leverage collaborative capabilities same as dossiers via the Library. End users can post comments and tag other users easily using these capabilities. Since filtering workflows remain the same in RSDs, the only feature missing when using collaboration with documents, is the ability to embed filters to pass context. Notifications on Library also work the same for documents.
So why is collaboration within RSDs important? The data only tells part of the story. In fact, in many cases, the data only tells a very small part of the story. The rest of the story comes from the discussions, questions, and answers people have around the data. All of this additional context, and value, was earlier lost to emails. We believe that all of that social context should exist alongside the data itself. We have added collaboration to Library so that people can talk about the data right alongside the data itself. This provides important context to the conversation, adds real insights alongside the data, and helps future users understand the information much more quickly. More importantly, we believe that collaboration vastly expands the number of users that take advantage of analytics by helping users understand the information and work with others.
7. Better sharing workflows: Analytics across the Enterprise
Documents also benefit from all the sharing modes in Library. One can invite users, copy or share links to RSDs directly via email, via a simple menu. While the PDF export capability is also exposed via the Share menu options, the export engine is the same as that for RSDs in the current platform. To leverage the brand new PDF export engine, one needs to use dossiers instead.
While dossiers provide a simple and quick path to self service and analytics across the organization, there are many benefits to RSDs that still make them the best choice when creating highly formatted and customized pixel perfect content for the Enterprise. Those benefits continue to exist within RSDs via the Library as well.
1. Pixel perfect design
Report Services documents have always been the main stay for well designed and formatted enterprise apps for the organization. While not as quick as the drag-and-drop dossier authoring paradigm, or as responsive on the consumption interface as dossiers - the level of formatting abilities and customizations that one can achieve with RSDs makes them a favorite of many organizations and teams.
Documents provide the ability to build sophisticated, pixel perfect applications and reports. This includes content that needs to look a very precise way for a specific form factor (device or paper), and applications that require custom workflows (buttons and transactions). All these workflows and capabilities continue to exist in RSDs consumed via Library as well.
2. Guided workflows and advanced analytical capabilities
Documents via Library also continue to support key capabilities particularly suited to building highly formatted applications with guided workflows. This includes information windows, panel stacks, advanced layout and formatting, and transaction services. These are some of the highly rated capabilities of RSDs that authors like and have remained untouched in 10.9 for the same reason. In future though, some of these capabilities might be built into dossiers themselves, providing the best of both worlds to authors and end users alike.
There are slight differences you may notice in some instances as we continue to integrate documents within the Library -
There may also be a few more minor differences. All of the these are in the process of being addressed and one will see the difference in coming releases.
3. Mobile specific workflows including transaction services
Documents designed specifically for the Mobile platform will continue to benefit from all the built in features and capabilities that make Strategy the #1 BI App in the Enterprise space. Capabilities including transaction services, custom workflows, offline etc. can continue to be leveraged on RSDs via Library as well. Even though RSDs do not leverage the latest responsive design code built for dossiers, one can continue to leverage layouts and views for specific form factors and interfaces.
Strategy continues to invest in its software and technologies to make BI and analytics available to the largest audience across all verticals and industries. While dossiers represent a big leap in the direction of self service and collaborative analytics, Report Service Documents continue to remain one of the most important foundations for report building across the Enterprise. As we go into the future, one will observe more and more overlapping of use cases and a set of Enterprise Apps that will benefit from the best of both worlds. The Library is the first attempt to bring the two worlds together and it will only get better from here.
