New Generation Software announced at COMMON this week it would soon have a new release of SmartView that will greatly expand a user's ability to create and customize analytical reports.

"We continue to design SmartView to be an OLAP module for any business user, not just for analysts who spend all day looking at data," said Bernard Gough, president and CEO of NGS.

The new release gives users the ability to create calculated fields from data fields and display them in different views including sophisticated charts and graphs. Gough said the calculated fields function is important because some values, for example average order quantity, or average order amount by product and territory, need to be calculated after being delivered to the SmartView user. Other values, of course, need to be calculated at the record level in the underlying query. Users might use SmartView, however, to quickly determine gross margins, averages, totals, percentages of totals, and other types of information that may not be furnished in their production database or underlying query. The module is designed to complement the high-level analysis provided by NGS-IQ Business Performance Dashboard module and the Web-based reporting supported through the IQ Server module.

The NGS-IQ module also now includes a one-step process to export SmartView data to Excel or HTML files and retain all formatting. This makes it easy to share data with other audiences through secure Web portals and collaborative tools. NGS also has enhanced SmartView's data filtering function so a user can more easily include or exclude presentation data.

Mary Lynn Treadwell, NGS customer relations manager, says SmartView can greatly help drive decision support tools down into the hands of business users since any Windows user authorized to run NGS-IQ reports can build an unlimited number of multi-dimensional reports without any programming or custom database design work on the IBM i. Despite its extensive list of analysis functions, SmartView uses very little memory on the PC side, according to Treadwell. Users can connect and leverage the resources of IBM i yet perform their analyses offline to make the most of their computing resources, she said.--Chris Smith