By Siobhan Kennedy
Business Objects SA next week unveils a new version of its decision support applications, boasting the usual crop of improvements: greater scaling, web connectivity and lower total cost of ownership. The French ISV says version 5.0 of its flagship BusinessObjects suite will enable its decision support, query, reporting and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) features to be used across large enterprises; beyond the 10,000 users version 4.0 of the software support. Bundling all of the BusinessObjects programs in one suite reduces overall cost of ownership, claims senior product marketing manager Frank Prabel – including resources needed to manage the applications – although it’s obviously a greater initial cost than buying point products. Prabel said the cost of implementing and managing DSS environments deterred some customers from buying the software. With BusinessObjects 5.0, IS staff only have to learn, deploy and maintain one interface to manage all the components. A new web- based report viewer enables users to read, refresh and print reports over the web without having to install any client-side software. On the feature side, version 5.0 includes a new function, called conditional formatting, which allows users to drill even further down into corporate data and produce reports based on certain pre-defined conditions. For example, a user who is generating invoice reports can automatically instruct the system to print off only those invoices past payment date. It also includes a new facility enabling users to search reports by category, date or author, or group them together, although only one can actually be accessed at a time. Version 5.0 also comes integrated with Business Objects’ Broadcast Server technology, announced in September (CI No 3,504), which allows users to publish and push pre-built or ad hoc reports around the enterprise via email, pager or fax. Version 5.0 has also been designed to make it easier for developers to customize both at the user interface level and with integration Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications. BusinessObjects can now be highly- integrated with Microsoft office applications. BusinessObjects Version 5.0 goes to beta in November and will be generally available in the first quarter of 1999.
