Cool MicroStrategy Web Plugins

BigDataLabs is a self funded organization sustained by providing consulting services for the MicroStrategy platform.  Over the last year we have done tons of custom plugins (SDK Customization) for our client.  Some of these are pretty cool so I thought I would share it with you here.

Portal Like Create Report Page

Prior to creating this plugin we implemented a self service MicroStrategy project centered around the idea of report builders.  This has been a phenomenal success in terms of adoption.  Our client went from 200 unique BI users a week to over 600 and growing.  Keep in mind that prior to this project there were  at least 6 projects in production.

As the number of report builders grew we needed a better way to organize them so we totally redesigned the create report page to be subject area oriented:

Subject Area Based Create Page

We organized all the report builders into specific subject areas that would be represented by an icon in the carousel selector at the top of the page.  When a users clicks on a specific subject, the accordion widget on the left side will populate with the report builders.  Simultaneously, the main content area will render a high level dashboard giving users highlights of the key metrics within that specific subject area.

If you look closely at the builder navigator on the left you’ll see that we append a last refresh time stamp and the number of hits.  The great thing about this design is that users can get their most frequently requested KPI’s immediately and then jump off into custom queries in a single view.

Cross Project Folder

Generally in very large BI environments you end up with about a dozen different projects or more.  Often users will have to log into Project A run reports and dashboards and then log into Project B do the same, so on and so on.

It gets really annoying browsing in multiple project environments.  Just think about how many clicks are involved especially with deeply nested folders.  Ideally, MicroStrategy should provide a cross project shortcut object so related information can be better organized.

Since we dont have an OOTB solution our client asked us to implement a custom plugin.  This was actually a pretty tough nut to crack.  However, I think we’ve arrived at a satisfactory solution that’s easy for developers to deploy.  In order to make a report in Project B visible in Project A a developer simply has to create a special folder named like so:

<identifier prefix>_<target folder GUID>_<target project name>_<target folder name>

Whenever our plugin sees a folder with the specified identifier (we used xprj) it will fetch the contents of the target folder and make it available in the current project’s folder browsing page.  Pretty simple concept but quite powerful when it comes to consolidating information across various departments and subject areas.