Clear Business Intelligence Reporting with ClearBI
What is ClearBI?
ClearBI is an Enterprise Reporting RIA from Farata Systems that offers unprecedented accessibility to business information for end users, literally giving them the freedom to create new or derivative dynamic business reports on their own, using any web-browser that has Adobe Flash Player installed.
ClearBI goes further than competitive products so that when users publish data, each authorised recipient can continue to modify or rework ad-hoc versions of those original reports, in derivative ways, republishing again, down the line, so that every stakeholder in the information dissemination chain, can make sense of it, from their own point of view.
"This is achieved without ever leaving the browser
(to make changes on the desktop and upload them)
and without reloading web pages from the Server."
What is even more exciting is that the report creation, modification, beautification and publication processes are all performed within Adobe’s powerful and ubiquitous Flash player, making the entire experience highly productive and memorable.
Fractal Reporting Engine
ClearBI talks the language of ‘live-paper’ by presenting structured data, in print-ready format that is still, in its infinite state, editable. In a sense ClearBI is a Fractal Reporting Engine for web browsers because each report may give birth to an unlimited number of variations and offshoots that resemble the original in some way.
Just imagine the difference between being able to log in with your web browser to view a canned report and print it versus logging in and being able to manipulate the report in your own way before printing it, and or repurposing it, for other users, without any assistance from IT.
ClearBI offers a sophisticated calculation and formula engine, report layout beautification, and simple please of use, via a familiar toolbar in your web browser. It also allows authorised users to push new or modified data back to the database.
Why Choose ClearBI?
ClearBI represents a radical departure from spreadsheets for analysing and modeling business information, as changes made by one person may be viewed and modified by anyone (with privileges), without ever destroying the original work.
ClearBI solves mistake-making challenges by offering the liberty to alter reports dynamically, at any point down the line, at any point in time. No longer are recipients constrained by canned reports or inflexible PDF documents, yet they still have the same options to print to PDF or export to Excel, at any time.
ClearBI is truly dynamic as it stores the underlying Report Layouts as META-data-structures in the same or a connected server database. So when Reports are called for via HTTP request, ClearBI compiles the layout and formulae META-data structures on the fly, and combines the Business Data from the Server Database. This seamless, unseen process, performed via Binary AMF data transfer protocol makes ClearBI extremely fast at presenting (modifiable) reports to end users.
ClearBI has a fully functional Report Editor and New Report Wizard presented in Adobe Flash player in the web browser that offers dynamic drag drop capability for designing tabular data structures and stylish interactivity for speed and ease of use to anyone familiar with spreadsheets.
Who should Use ClearBI?
There are two versions of ClearBI: Developer Edition and Server Edition.
ClearBI Developer Edition allows software developers to visually create and customize reports in Eclipse IDE. The report layouts are captured in MXML and can be compiled and integrated into any Flash application. End users will be able to work with reports performing sorting, filtering, grouping, export to Microsoft Excel, et al., but will not be able to save the customised report.
This software is the best fit for the organisations that need a tool to create canned reports to be viewed by end-users. Even though these reports are read-only they can be viewed independently or integrated into other web applications, and may continue to allow the end user to make sorting, filtering, and grouping modifications before printing or exporting.
ClearBI Server Edition (2CPUs) delivers all the functionality of the Developer Edition - to the end user. It allows end users to create reports from the universe of data fields without the need to install any software. End users can create, customise and save reports in the centralised database server without any help from the IT department.
End users can customise and save their reports, or save variations. The number of end users is not limited. This software license is a good fit for small businesses.
ClearBI Server Edition Enterprise delivers all the functionality of the Server Edition for medium to large corporations.
In addition to using LiveCycle Data Services as a data source for the reports ClearBI will be able to process the data coming from SOAP-based Web services, use open source OpenAMF communication layer to connect to the server-size Java classes, or use simple JavaScript arrays with report data, which makes it very attractive to AJAX developers.
ClearBI Reports and Interface Screenshots
The stylish ClearBI interface is presented as if it were an extra, rather nice looking, toolbar in your browser, as shown below. (click the images for a larger view)
Application Toolbar and Report 
Edit Panel
Clicking on the 'edit' icon opens a fully featured panel in which users can modify base reports and save them as derivative works, or new templates. The 'edit' panel provides layout, filtering, sorting, grouping, printing, and query functionality in a simple and well thought out, drag and drop interface.
Toolbar
ClearBI toolbar is easily accessible and offers the following 20 functions: 
1. Template - Basic and end-user modified templates
2. Report - End user's published reports
3. Refresh data
4. Edit - pops up the report edit panel
5. Copy - allows users to copy the new report or turn it into a new template
6. Delete composition
7. Composition Wizard - allows end user to create new templates from scratch
8. Remove Filter
9. Show/Hide columns
10. Auto-resize columns
11. Edit Layout - pops up layout beautification panel
12. Edit Group - pops up drag/drop group editing feature
13. Sort - pops up drag/drop column sorting feature
14. Filter - pops up conditional filtering feature
15. Save (as new)
16. Zoom magnification
17. Zoom indicator
18. Flat Excel export
19. Structured Excel export
20. Print (to paper or PDF)
ClearBI Support & RIA Application Development
We support our customers both small and large with a highly skilled international Rich Application Development and Support team, on almost any time zone. Our software engineers are renowned in the Adobe Flex camp and have contributed significantly directly and indirectly to the development of Adobe Flex.
Support agreements may be tailored to your company's particular needs.
Read more about our Rich Internet Application Development Services
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