Sneak Peek at the Enhanced Business Intelligence Charts & Reports Coming in Chart Plus R3.5

Communicating, reporting, and distributing business data throughout the organization is critically important for every company. This data represent a powerful tool that companies use to measure and show progress in key areas, and upon which they're able to base strategic decisions. Bamboo's goal is to make Chart Plus even more flexible, and to improve interoperability between SharePoint and other software and external data sources so that our customers have the ability to display charts regardless of the data source or location. Chart Plus R3.5 for SharePoint 2010 will soon be released, and I would like to give you an advance look at some of the high-level features about which I'm most excited:

• Display charts from an external list using External Content Type based on SQL Server Table data:

The External List is used for displaying content that comes from Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Enterprise content types. BCS provides a read-only view of your business data, but now you can take advantage of using the external list option in SharePoint Server 2010 as the data source and display the data in chart form via Chart Plus:

• Using secure store account, connect and display charts from a SQL Server table where the SQL database is not on the same server:

Secure Store Service and Secure Store account can be used to access external data or data that are not stored on the same SharePoint server. In this case, users can use the secure store account as a replacement for a Single Sign-on method to access a SQL Server table/view and display the charts in Chart Plus: 

•  Filtering:

If you have a huge set of data and you want to zoom in on a subset, you can use one of the options below to filter. For example, you have a set of data which show how your Sales team is doing this quarter. You can check to see how your Sales Manager John Smith is doing by using one of the filtering methods:   

• Dynamically filter charts using Runtime Filter View
• Dynamically filter charts using Web Part Connection
• Filter charts based on SQL table data using criteria options

• Interactive reports that let you quickly and dynamically change a bar chart to a pie chart, or a bar chart to a line chart (and back again):

• Read data from Excel Workbook to generate charts using Excel Services:

Using Chart Plus, organizations can now access, customize, and share data related to revenue, performance metrics, and statistics that are stored in Excel datasheets:

Be sure to stop by our booth (#941) at the SharePoint Conference in November to see Chart Plus 3.5 in action. Sign up to get an alert when version 3.5 is available, or contact our sales team for more information. As always, our product enhancements are driven by listening to our loyal customers, and adding the critical enhancements that you require in order to further increase your business efficiency.