Oracle Magazine - March/April 2012

Figure 4: Content formatted with a mobile layout on the iPhone

this dashboard, tap the down arrow at the top of the page, as shown in Figure 2.

Just as you can with dashboards on your laptop or desktop, you can interact with pivot tables, prompts, and other objects on the iPad screen to further explore your data. For example, you can tap Email at the bottom of the screen to send a link to that page to someone, and you can tap Refresh at any time to update your view of the data, live. (Note that Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile requires a connection with your Oracle Business Intelligence server, through either Wi-Fi or a cellular network.)

You can also expose key performance
indicators (KPIs) through Oracle Business
Intelligence Mobile to keep up to date with
performance measures for your organization,
and you can use Alerts on your Favorites
list, shown in Figure 3, to receive messages
sent from the Oracle Business Intelligence
server, such as when revenue is likely to fall
short for a quarter or metrics for a store are
out of tolerance. To define alerts such as
these, create agents (which run analyses in
the background) with the Oracle Business
Intelligence dashboard to determine
whether an alert condition is met; when this
happens, the alert will appear in the list of
alerts on your mobile device so that you can
respond appropriately.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN YOUR POCKE T
WI TH THE IPHONE

Although tablet computers such as the iPad are great for analyzing data on a relatively large screen, you might want to consult your company data while on the move and with only a smartphone in your pocket. Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile is also available for the iPhone and iPod touch and is downloaded, installed, and configured in the same way as on the iPad.

With Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile installed and configured on your iPhone or iPod touch, you can access dashboards in the same way as with the iPad. Given the smaller screen, however, you might want to take advantage of the mobile layout— available on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad— which, instead of displaying all content in the desktop layout, rearranges the content in a vertical, stacked layout and resizes graphs to make them fit the screen better, as shown in Figure 4.

Tap Menu in the top left corner of the screen to bring up the View menu, and then select either Mobile Layout or Original Layout to switch between the two layout modes on your iOS device.

SO HOW DOES ORACLE BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE MOBILE WORK?
Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile is a
“hybrid” iOS application that uses native
controls with server-side rendering to deliver
BI content to your mobile device. To reduce
network load, it caches content and strips
out unneeded JavaScript code, and Oracle
Business Intelligence Presentation Services
renders graphs in an image format that can
be displayed by iOS devices. Prompts and
sliders are converted to native controls, and
map views are simplified to display better on
mobile devices. As a BI content developer,
though, you do not need to do anything
special to make your content available to
mobile users, and as an iPad, iPhone, or
iPod touch user, all you need are the details
for connecting to your Oracle Business
Intelligence server.

CONCLUSION

With Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile, you can access your BI content on the road, in a café, or wherever else you may be when you need that information—fast. All content on your BI server is available to you, and you can access content such as KPIs, alerts, published reports, and performance dashboards from your mobile device. To try out Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile now, download the app from the Apple App Store, install the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g Release 1 ( 11. 1. 1. 5) sample application—which contains several mobile-focused dashboards, alerts, and analyses— on the server you will connect to, and access your business intelligence on the go! 

Mark Rittman is an
Oracle ACE Director,
technical director at
Rittman Mead, and
an executive board
member of the Oracle
Development Tools User Group. He writes for the
Rittman Mead blog at rittmanmead.com/blog.