Application Development

Suggest and discuss enhancements for TM1
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blackhawk
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Application Development

Post by blackhawk »

I am curious to know how many people are interested in developing web-based applications around their TM1 solutions. By this, I mean, is there a real need out there to create more customized and guided applications for your users, or do you find that you can do everything you need today and they are happy with how the information is presented?
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Alan Kirk
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Re: Application Development

Post by Alan Kirk »

blackhawk wrote:I am curious to know how many people are interested in developing web-based applications around their TM1 solutions. By this, I mean, is there a real need out there to create more customized and guided applications for your users, or do you find that you can do everything you need today and they are happy with how the information is presented?
Happy with how the information is presented???

In Web????

You're {bleep}in' me, right? :lol:

No, seriously I think that presentation is fine in Excel, provided that your users can and will use Excel. And for management accountants and the like, Excel really is the way to go.

However for dashboarding (etc) for senior management, directors, roadshow presentations to investors and the like, a web presentation is what's expected these days. But the problem with Web is that it is just so, for want of a better term, crude.

For such presentations, you can't just assign access to views and say "Hey, here you go, drill down to your heart's content", you really need to be able to define the reports so that the audience sees what's relevant without needing to understand the chart of accounts or the products hierarchy or other dimension structures. That means websheets as things stand.

Oh, but the websheets! The fonts are frequently jaggy if you go above about 10 points (as with headings), the column widths that you need bear little relationship to what you saw in Excel, the charts look like they were drawn with a crayon, the action buttons are all but impossible to work with when they're in hyperlink format since they become invisible in edit mode which means that despite your best efforts their alignment is often just a smidge "off", you can't put in hyperlinks to .pdf documents unless they're hosted on an actual web server somewhere (not in the Applications folders), inserted graphics need to be in .png format (an issue not mentioned in any of the manuals) if you want them to avoid looking like they've been through a blender... it's just not a good look. And that's in IE. Don't go there in FireFox.

Then you have issues like the fact that you can't activate or deactivate the navigation tree (or part thereof) on a user by user basis but instead have to do it on a global basis (an utterly appalling design decision), and the speed issue if a websheet is too large... you'll find a bunch of these issues if you search back through past postings.

Yes, I know that some say "Use EV" but frankly EV has issues of its own which let's not go into here.

I guess the dream (or mine anyway) would be to be able to generate DHTML content in something like Dreamweaver and have an easy (well, relatively easy) way of doing a link to a TM1 back end to get the latest numbers. That would give you access to the full array of web presentation options beyond the data itself. Want to embed a Flash video clip from the CEO? You could do that. Want to have standard .jpgs which won't get distorted? You could do that. Want to have .pdfs hosted on the local server that the viewer can open? You could do that. Want numbers on screen that don't look like they were generated by a dot matrix printer? You betcha.

I understand that Web needed to be designed to do many things from presentation to data entry to allowing views to be manipulated with a zero footprint (unlike EV, where you do need to add further software to get the browser to use it or did with the last version that I looked at), and I wouldn't disparage the amount of effort that had to be put in to get it to do that. The problem with Web, IMHO, is that while it can do those many things... it does none of them exceptionally well, and the presentation limitations are the most pointed example of this.
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blackhawk
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Re: Application Development

Post by blackhawk »

Alan,

Thanks for your reply. And I agree with a lot of your comments. Part of the reason that I am asking this is because we have been struggling with this paradigm for some time now. So much so, that we ended up putting together a web application for some of our customers.

After looking at the finished product and contemplating how we could use this with other customers, we started working on an internal application development platform for TM1. We considered, why stop at internal? Would this be something that would be of interest to others?

Now, I also know you enough (or at least several years of your forum posts) to know that you are in deep and you probably have similar views as we do as to how things should be able to work. The real queston is: Are other less savvy TM1 users interested in this type of capability? Or is this need just reserved for the powerhouses? For the masses, does TM1 Excel/EV/Web suffice and they are happy? Or are there many out there looking for something more?
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George Regateiro
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Re: Application Development

Post by George Regateiro »

From my companies stand point right now the basics that TM1 provides (Web, Excel and EV) have generally sufficed. Many of the folks that I know around my area would be hard pressed to step outside those bounds and develop an entire web application to replace the TM1 front ends. We have used the APIs in the sole capacity of getting around some the limitations the system puts on you, but from a shear maintenance perspective we try to stay in the bounds of the delivered software.

In the end Excel and its web version are fairly natural to people. Though app development plays a great role in augmenting the system I could not see any of my employers justifying building enitre front ends to replace what they have already purchased without a very good reason.
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Steve Vincent
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Re: Application Development

Post by Steve Vincent »

All this is what i believe Cognos is trying to do with 9.4. I've seen a demo with TM1 9.4 and Cognos 8.4 using Cognos as the front end and TM1 as the data source. Its the first demo i've seen the guys do that hasn't gone wrong, so that's got to say something about it. It was suitably flexible for us to think "we might be able to use that" but we didn't get to see how much / little work was invloved in creating what we saw. That may well be the future, it certainly blew TM1web out of the water and in to the middle of the Saraha.
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George Regateiro
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Re: Application Development

Post by George Regateiro »

Steve Vincent wrote:All this is what i believe Cognos is trying to do with 9.4. I've seen a demo with TM1 9.4 and Cognos 8.4 using Cognos as the front end and TM1 as the data source. Its the first demo i've seen the guys do that hasn't gone wrong, so that's got to say something about it. It was suitably flexible for us to think "we might be able to use that" but we didn't get to see how much / little work was invloved in creating what we saw. That may well be the future, it certainly blew TM1web out of the water and in to the middle of the Saraha.
We had an in house demo of it and for advanced reporting the BI route was incredibly easy to set up and produce some fairly nice reports out of the box. The one thing about the BI suite was that you were limited to what they provided through the GUI. So you might hit instances where the report is more complex then the gui can handle, but as a report writting interface is is probably of the easiest to use and most fully featured I have come across. If the TM1 client is an option in your environment BI can be a great enhancement, especially if you have alot of read only type of users.
blackhawk
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Re: Application Development

Post by blackhawk »

Thanks for all of the input on this. It is very helpful.

While I know Cognos 8 BI is addressing the reporting end of it, what about the data collection and the user navigation to the data?

Is there any interest for people to be able to create rich, guided applications over the web for TM1 without requiring a developer?
agtan
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Re: Application Development

Post by agtan »

All:

This is a very interesting discussion. From our experience with OLAPObjects for TM1 I can say that there is definitely a gap in TM1's functionality vis a vis web application development. Not everyone needs it or wants it, but if you need (for example) a rich web based budgeting application in which the vision requires features like:

- fine control over drop downs (e.g. on THIS page users should only see level 2 elements even if they have security rights to the whole dimension)
- dependent drop downs (e.g. if I select cost center A in drop down 1 then I should only see employees from A in drop down 2; if I change to cost center B then drop down 2's employees change immediately)
- dynamically expanding columns (e.g. if I initialize a new version of the budget, I want a new column to appear in my report)
- nested dynamically expanding rows (e.g. if I have 2 dimensions, geography and products, and I select channel A, I will see sales of all product sold through channel A grouped by geography)
- customizable menus: where to put them, how they should look (fonts, colors, orders), whether you want a menu at all, different menus on different pages, different menus for different users, etc.
- customizable extensibility via ASP.NET using an intuitive object model (e.g. cube("Sales").dimensions, MyDimension.Name)

Activeforms, action buttons and the 8.4 BI platform are getting us closer to what some of our clients are asking for, but they are still not enough to get the features I have listed here (among others).

Apologies if this sounds too much like a shameless plug (I’m happy to migrate further discussion to the Commercial forum) - but the fact that 50+ of our active customers still don't see an alternative to OLAPObjects is a concrete data point that answers the question: yes there *is* a need for tools to support TM1 based web application development.

Regards,
Ann-Grete Tan
QueBIT Consulting LLC
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