• Deliver enterprise BI with higher performance and efficiency
  • Develop and deploy departmental BI applications quickly
  • Migrate seamlessly from departmental BI to enterprise BI

MicroStrategy 9: New Features

New Features in MicroStrategy 9

The following list contains over 50 new and enhanced features: a small collection of the huge assortment of new features available in MicroStrategy 9. These features are each specifically designed to support all levels of BI, from workgroup, to departmental, to enterprise.

Major architectural changes and new products in MicroStrategy 9

As part of the over 8,000 enhancements that were made in the MicroStrategy 9 release, three improvements greatly changed the landscape of business intelligence from MicroStrategy:

  • MicroStrategy MultiSource Option — With the MultiSource Option, business users can surf-and-save across multiple databases and seamlessly access data from any source. Completely transparent to both end users and report designers, the MultiSource Option enables a unified model of an organization’s data that spans the many, individual data warehouses, marts, and departmental databases within the BI environment. Any user can create and analyze reports and dashboards that contain data from any and all sources in the enterprise. Learn More »
  • MicroStrategy OLAP Services and In-Memory Capabilities — MicroStrategy OLAP Services 9 provides the enhanced Intelligent Cube™, a dynamic in-memory cache that leverages the strength of the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server Security and Personalization Engines, and provides analytical flexibility by leveraging the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server Analytical Engine. Users can analyze the full depth and breadth of their data warehouse with OLAP Services, since no limits are set on data scalability, analytical scope, or drill-through capability. In-memory operation delivers faster overall performance, improves performance for the most time-consuming queries (from hours to seconds), and shifts the load onto MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, freeing up database capacity. Learn More »
  • MicroStrategy Distribution Services — Distribution Services provides high-volume, automated distribution of reports, documents, dashboards, and business performance alerts via email, file servers, and networked printers. Distribution Services enables greater user self-service for all report distribution and business monitoring needs – reducing reliance on IT. Learn More »

More BI / Less IT Effort: Enhanced Web Interactivity

Continuing to improve the end-user experience via the MicroStrategy Web client was an important focus of the work that went into MicroStrategy 9. Specifically, engineers focused on adding more features to the Web and making the Web faster.

  • More User-friendly Web interface – A re-designed Web user interface that leverages many familiar, user-friendly paradigms, including folder-tree navigation, ribbon toolbars, accordion controls, control-click multi-select capabilities, and context-sensitive right-click actions.
  • Prompt and Filter Creation – Create stand-alone, reusable prompt and filter objects directly from Web, using intuitive interfaces.
  • Multi-select Filtering and Drilling – Select individual rows and columns on a grid to quickly and easily format, drill, pivot, and perform other tasks on-the-fly.
  • Threshold Creation – Quickly apply predefined thresholds – such as the top 5% performing products–or define your own detailed thresholds and conditional formatting using new editors.
  • Flash Content in DHTML – Display and interact with Flash content, such as widgets or flash-enabled selectors, in Interactive, View, or Flash modes.
  • Full Function Library – Instantly create complex derived metrics using the Function Wizard, which includes a documented library of functions available for any calculation imaginable.
  • Complete Subtotal Control – Calculate the exact subtotals you need for all of your reports using an improved Subtotal Editor that enables the definition of more advanced subtotals.
  • Link Editor – Easily define connections between one report or document and another report or document while passing parameters to answer any prompts in the target object.
  • 64-bit Web Server Support – Maintain far more concurrent user sessions and run much larger reports, all within the same server. This is achieved via full support for 64-bit Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) in both J2EE Web servers as well as ASP.net Web Servers. The expanded memory available in 64-bit JVMs allows for optimal Web performance across the enterprise.
  • Extreme AJAX Code Structures – Leverage a re-engineered Web server that adheres to an “Extreme AJAX” model, delivering a much more responsive, interactive Web experience for business users. In Extreme AJAX, processing is shifted from the Web server to the Web browser, freeing up Web servers so they can support additional user sessions. With Extreme AJAX, MicroStrategy Web supports more users with faster performance using the same web servers, resulting in a lower cost of departmental and enterprise BI.

More BI / Less IT Effort: Enhanced Dashboard and Enterprise Reporting

Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards were an important breakthrough for MicroStrategy 8, and in MicroStrategy 9, they become even more useful. Improvements include an easier design experience, more interactivity, and better performance.

  • Out-of-the Box Statement Printing – New Report Services features that allow business users to develop complex enterprise reporting and customer statements, without programming. This is achieved through flexible, automatic formatting features, such as horizontal repeating sections, dynamically-selected images, vertical text layout, multi-layout reports, automatic table of contents generation, automatic pagination, and watermarks.
  • Multi-layout Documents – Combine all of your frequently-used dashboards into a single convenient “dashboard book” that can be run once and quickly referenced throughout the day. Or, include multiple document layouts in a single document to simply provide an integrated view of business data.
  • HTML Containers – Add depth and perspective to your dashboards by incorporating live web content such as stock tickers and real-time feeds.
  • Dashboard Templates – Create or use out-of-the-box dashboard templates to decrease document design time. A dashboard template is a predefined structure that can contain datasets, layouts, and controls, such as titles, panels, and panel stacks.
  • Instant Document Creation From Reports - Instantly create a document or dashboard from an existing report, which is displayed as a Grid/Graph on the document.
  • Document Autostyles – Employ a varied collection of new autostyles to quickly apply a set of fonts and colors to an existing dashboard.
  • Dashboard Drilling – Perform OLAP manipulations, such as drilling, directly on grids and graphs contained within dashboards.
  • Linked Formatting – Link a Grid/Graph to the original report by adding it to the document as a shortcut. Any changes, such as formatting a metric or changing the graph type, made to a report are passed to the Grid/Graph in the document.

More BI / Less IT Effort: Enhanced Business User Self-Service

Empowering business users at the enterprise and workgroup levels is always an important focus of MicroStrategy engineering. The MicroStrategy 9 release includes many enhancements that extend even more functionality to the end user, and away from requiring IT support.

  • Streamlined Report Design for Business Users – Assemble reports more quickly and easily via intuitive, self-service features, such as the simplified browsing of available dimensions, attributes, and metrics; drop zones that provide visual cues to users as to where to drag-and-drop these building blocks; and a formatting control for report formatting that is intuitive to Microsoft Office users.
  • New Graph Report Designer – Interactively build graph reports with dozens of visualization options using a new and intuitive graph design tool that makes it easier for designers to visualize the final output of their graphs. Drag and drop elements into metrics, categories, and series zones; use right-click options to quickly format graph elements; and quickly apply a variety of colors and styles to graphs.
  • Derived Elements – A new feature of MicroStrategy OLAP Services 9 that can be used to enhance the analysis on Intelligent Cube™ reports and Report Service documents. Elements of an attribute can be combined on-the-fly to create and save reusable filters, groups, lists, and calculations.
  • Collaboration and Notes – Add notes and comments to reports and documents to provide instructions to other users, share information, and more. Every report and document can maintain and display a set of notes, with details on who left the note and when.
  • Personalized Prompt Answers – Store personalized answers for a prompt and reuse them wherever the prompt is present, saving time and ensuring efficient prompt handling while running documents and reports.
  • New, Faster Prompt Interface – More user friendly and responsive prompt interface, delivering vastly improved performance for both the display and use of prompts.
  • Complete OLAP Analysis – Freely investigate data and “surf” through the data warehouse without having to design a new report for each new combination of data you want to see. Perform OLAP manipulations, such as pivoting and drilling, directly on graph reports and more.
  • Create and Edit MicroStrategy Reports and Documents in MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, and MS Word with MicroStrategy Office – Edit and create reports and documents directly from MicroStrategy Office, through a seamless integration with MicroStrategy Web.

More BI / Less IT Effort: Improved Analytical Capabilities

With the release of MicroStrategy 9, report and dashboard designers will be pleased to find even more options in the analytic libraries and even more options for interactivity and connectivity.

  • New, Improved Widgets – Analyze and control advanced visualizations such as the Heat Map widget in new, innovative ways.
  • Greater Range of Analytics – Leverage a wide range of new data mining algorithms, statistical predictive, and OLAP functions, as well as improved metric grouping capabilities. Integrate with these analytics to develop complex statistical calculations, more effective forecasting metrics, and many different forecast models for the same metrics.
  • Report directly against Salesforce.com – Available as part of MicroStrategy MultiSource Option, a Salesforce.com ODBC driver allows users to seamlessly create and run BI reports and dashboards using Salesforce.com data.

Global Applications and Distributed Operations

As business intelligence applications grow in size and in user base, it is inevitable that many business users will be in different geographies with different language and administration requirements. With improvements in Internationalization and distributed administration, MicroStrategy 9 continues to make extending and growing applications easier.

  • Multi-lingual Metadata and Data – Deploy a single project in multiple languages, ensuring that employees and customers all over the world can always access essential business information in their own language. Business users can view MicroStrategy interfaces, as well as their own reports, metrics, attributes, and data in their own language, enabling more convenient and collaborative analysis across the enterprise.
  • Repository Translation Wizard – A component of Object Manager, the Repository Translation Wizard facilitates the translation of metadata objects by copying the object strings into a translation repository to assist with the translation process.
  • Update Packages – Available in Object Manager, update packages enable multiple and independent development teams to coordinate the inclusion of their new developments into the global operational BI system. Each development team can independently submit updates, additions, and changes to an existing operational system. The new update packages are then used to incrementally install each team’s updates and reconcile all overlaps or conflicts that might arise.
  • Distributed Administration – A new administrative capability that allows the sub-setting of administrative duties and the distribution of administrative responsibilities to business units and departments. This enables central IT groups to relinquish routine administrative duties, such as user administration, project administration, and user security administration, to other administrators in the system.
  • Web-Based Administration – Administrators can create, modify, and manage users, groups, and security roles from MicroStrategy Web, allowing them to manage the BI system from anywhere, at any time.

Time-to-Value: Rapid Project Design

As part of the emphasis on enabling business intelligence at the workgroup and departmental level, the release of MicroStrategy 9 includes important enhancements that make the design and architecture process faster and easier.

  • Graphical Architect – A new version of MicroStrategy Architect that allows users to map their business model into a MicroStrategy metadata from a single interface that can be used to build metadata objects through simple drag-and-drop and right-click operations. The new MicroStrategy Architect streamlines the project modeling experience, making it interactive and visual, thereby drastically reducing the time required to build and deploy complex project models.
  • Cube Advisor – A new tool that allows users to create and support a dynamic sourcing strategy that can best support the reports in their projects. Cube Advisor helps achieve this by analyzing reports to determine if their report definitions can support the use of dynamic sourcing, and recommending and creating Intelligent Cubes that can provide data to reports using dynamic sourcing.

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: Administration and Performance

MicroStrategy continues to push the boundaries of enterprise business intelligence by developing even more intelligent software that enables you to get at your data and operate more efficiently. Administration and design have never been easier with MicroStrategy.

  • Support for 64-bit Windows – MicroStrategy Intelligence Server and its integrated technologies—OLAP Services, Report Services, Distribution Services—are now supported on the Microsoft Windows 64-bit Operating System.
  • SQL Engine Optimization – A new level of SQL optimization designed to improve performance by eliminating unnecessary SQL passes and optimizing multi-pass SQL generation. This delivers the fastest report performance at all times, at any scale, to all business users in the enterprise. Tests with real data warehouses and reports have shown dramatic improvement with the new SQL optimization, with as much as a 55% query time reduction for complex queries.
  • Change Journaling – A new change journaling feature in MicroStrategy Object Manager, designed to track and audit changes made to any metadata object in the BI system. This is a major feature of object versioning that will ensure that companies successfully complete audits and remain Sarbanes-Oxley compliant.
  • Security Enhancements – Ensure enterprise-wide data security and login flexibility via improved password strength requirements, encryption, and out-of-the-box single sign-on capabilities, supporting Microsoft Active Directory (LDAP and Kerberos), Tivoli, and SiteMinder. The enhanced security integration significantly speeds up user configuration.
  • Intelligent Clustering – Improved job distribution and Intelligence Server clustering delivers higher throughput, better asset utilization, and enhanced system performance. Scheduled jobs can now be shared across clustered Intelligence Servers and are distributed by job load.
  • Improved Caching – Experience minimal report and document wait times as a result of a new, automatic report caching level and the caching of Report Services documents in their final formatted output, including PDF, Excel, XML, CSV, and HTML.
  • Flexible History List Management – Store History List messages, along with their entire caches, in a database, as opposed to a file system. This flexibility improves the reliability of retrieving the messages and data, and also improves scalability since there can be an "infinite" storage of history lists in the database.
  • Improved Enterprise Manager – Take advantage of new operating system performance counters, and report on In-Memory ROLAP cube usage, Distribution Services, and prompt answer statistics.
  • Improved Command Manager – Command Manager now runs on all supported platforms, and includes new Java programming capabilities, including conditions, loops, and variables. Where no graphical user interface is available, Command Manager‘s new text-based interface allows script creation and execution. New procedures allowing for the creation of custom extensions, and a large number of usability enhancements result in a rapid script development experience.
  • Improved Integrity Manager – Take advantage of the improved prompt resolution functionality in Integrity Manager by prioritizing prompt resolution strategies or specifying report-level prompt answers to be used in each Integrity Manager test., Integrity Manager also enhances your integrity testing by comparing the PDF output of reports and documents.

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: Easily Extend Your MicroStrategy BI to More People

MicroStrategy customers have always been the most demanding in the industry, looking to customize their environments and applications to ensure seamless integration to their existing applications. With MicroStrategy 9, even more capabilities are possible.

  • Portlet-to-portlet Communication – Portal Integration is available Out of the Box and included FREE with Every Web Server. Integrated your BI easily with Microsoft SharePoint, SAP NetWeaver Portal, Oracle WebLogic, and IBM Websphere. Portal integration enables greater User Scale and Easier User Adoption for Your Business Intelligence Using Your Existing Enterprise Portals.
  • Plug-in Architecture – The Customization Upgrade Wizard facilitates the management of customizations by creating portable pieces of software, called plug-ins. These plug-ins can be easily installed and deployed in MicroStrategy Web, so that compilation or modification of the source code is no longer required. Sample applications such as the External Security Sample Application are now available as plug-ins.
  • Improved Composite Applications and Mash-Ups - Improved integration with Flex 3 and Adobe's Air Engine eases the development of fully-functional and fully-disconnected flash-based applications that can download and store all necessary data, but run on the desktop without any web connectivity.
  • Eclipse READY™ Web Configuration Editor – Organize, streamline, and simplify customizations in MicroStrategy Web. Eliminate the need to manually modify default configuration files such as the Page Configuration file, the Style Catalog Configuration file, or presentation files such as JSP or ASP.NET files.
  • Integration with FlexBuilder IDE – Create a variety of Adobe Flash-based RIA Applications, Adobe AIR applications, and more, via a tight MicroStrategy integration with Adobe Flex.