Quickly Build Custom Applications with Minimal Programming Skills

Developers can perform most customizations with very little to no programming, as most of the common customization scenarios are externalized into configuration files. In addition, the Web Customization Editor displays these files in an intuitive, user-friendly interface, allowing developers to easily organize, streamline, and simplify customizations. As a result, customizations are easier to build, maintain, and upgrade, resulting in quicker deployments, as well as lower development and support costs over time.

Migrate, Manage, and Deploy Customizations With Ease

The layered, object-oriented architecture of MicroStrategy Web and comprehensive documentation in the SDK make it easy for developers to identify and isolate the objects to be customized, minimizing impact to unaffected objects and functions. Furthermore, MicroStrategy Web provides a framework (plug-in architecture) for plugging your customization changes as a piece of software (called a plug-in) into MicroStrategy Web. Thanks to the separation of the customization code changes from default code, plug-ins can be used to extend functionality of MicroStrategy Web without the need to recompile or to add new functionality to MicroStrategy Web and without requiring access to source code. The Web Customization Editor provided with the MicroStrategy SDK leverages the plug-in architecture by creating plug-ins that can be easily deployed in MicroStrategy Web. Since plug-ins are independent, the architecture is designed to accommodate future additions of plug-ins without affecting the source code. All MSDL customization scenarios, as well as sample applications such as the External Security Module sample application, are now available as plug-ins. This ensures that they can be easily ported and deployed from one MicroStrategy Web machine to another by simply inserting the plug-in into the appropriate folder inside the MicroStrategy Web installation.

Develop Highly-Customized BI Applications

The MicroStrategy platform contains the most complete and comprehensive API in the BI industry. This open, services-oriented API allows organizations to build highly-specialized web or client-server applications that leverage the industrial-strength capabilities of the MicroStrategy BI platform. User functionality, workflows, report presentation, user management, security, administration, system configuration, and monitoring are only some of the capabilities System Integrators, Value Added Resellers, and OEMs using MicroStrategy have relied on. MicroStrategy’s open API allows these types of organizations and many more to build highly-customized and functional BI applications for their customers.

Easy to Learn and Develop

Developers will quickly learn how to use MicroStrategy APIs and deploy customized applications with several advanced tools within the MicroStrategy SDK. The comprehensive Developer Library facilitates quick learning by illustrating the function call workflow for common operations, quick API call references and step-by-step tutorials on common customization tasks. Developers can use higher-level API objects to dramatically reduce the amount of written code and code maintenance while still providing access to more advanced functionality. The SDK also contains open source code in the form of sample applications and utilities. These sample applications illustrate key uses of the APIs and provide tools for development, while production-ready utilities ensure fastest time to value for every application.

Integrate MicroStrategy into Existing Business Applications

MicroStrategy’s task-oriented architecture promotes reuse at a service level, which can allow businesses to respond quickly to market changes. In addition, using data as a service allows companies to focus on how best to use the analytical power of the MicroStrategy platform to improve applications across the enterprise. With this in mind, MicroStrategy’s task infrastructure is optimized and designed to be:

• More responsive: A lighter weight API is used to retrieve content and format responses
• Parameter-driven: Consuming applications need to understand parameters, not logic
• Stateless: Tasks are designed to provide rapid feedback of only the data needed to fulfill a request