Have you ever wondered how fast you can process and visualize over a billion rows of data? With the right tools, it can be done in just six seconds!

With the Syncfusion^® Big Data Platform, you can process billions of rows of data, and with Bold BI^®, you can visualize that data in under a minute without writing a single line of code.

Why is fast data loading important in dashboards?

Fast data loading is essential for ensuring a seamless user experience and maximizing the effectiveness of dashboards. When users can load more data in dashboards quickly, it leads to numerous benefits, including:

• User experience: Users seek quick access to information. Rapid data processing enhances their ability to engage with and analyze data efficiently.
• Real-time decision-making: Speed allows businesses to analyze data instantly and make quick, informed decisions.
• Enhanced productivity: Efficient data processing and visualization optimize workflows, enabling teams to achieve more in less time and concentrate on strategic initiatives rather than waiting for data.
• Minimized waiting time: Quick data loading and visualizations reduce delays, making it easier for users to access and use their data.

How to load and visualize a billion rows in a dashboard

The Syncfusion Big Data Platform can process billions of data points with impressive response times, and Bold BI can display those data points in stunning dashboards in under a minute. By using these solutions together, you will unlock insights from deep within your data and make business decisions quickly.

Visualizing over 1.1 billion NYC taxi rides with dashboards

To show off the impressive capabilities of the Big Data Visualization Platform and Bold BI, we’ll demonstrate how you can visualize a billion NYC Taxi rides in one dashboard.

We take a sample data set of over 1.1 billion records from the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission dataset from NYC Open Data. This dataset contains all taxi trips that occurred between 2009 and 2015 in New York City.

After uploading the data to the Big Data Platform, tuning it, caching it, and partitioning it, we then use Bold BI to visualize it.

Now, let’s connect the data through a SparkSQL data source. To create a SparkSQL data source from the Bold BI dashboard designer, follow the steps listed in “Choose the SparkSQL data source” in the Bold BI documentation. After authenticating the database, click Connect to connect to the SparkSQL server that’s been configured. Drag the table from the left pane into the center pane and then save the data source. This can be accomplished in less than 30 seconds.

The created data source will be added to the DATA SOURCES panel. Once the data source is created, add the widget you want to visualize the data with to your dashboard by dragging and dropping it onto the designer surface. In this demonstration, we’ll use a bar chart widget.

Assign data to the added widget. Apply aggregate functions to the columns you’re going to visualize.

Once the data is assigned, you are visualizing billions of rows, simplifying complex information for quick comprehension. In the following figure, we use three separate charts to summarize over a billion records in business dashboard.

Click Preview to view the full dashboard.

Save time and money with Bold BI

You have seen how massive amounts of data can be visualized in just a few seconds by using these Syncfusion platforms. Not only do they save you time, but they also save you money. Check out the Bold BI interactive pricing calculator to see how affordable our enterprise-grade data visualizations are.

If you want to learn more about this topic, visit our YouTube channel or watch the video here.

Bold BI^® empowers businesses to unlock valuable insights from vast and complex datasets. With seamless, hassle-free integration, it connects to diverse data sources, enabling you to make confident, data-driven decisions. Don’t hesitate—start using Bold BI today by signing up for a free trial and discover the future of data visualization!

We are excited to announce our upcoming webinar, “Optimizing Inventory Management for a Retail Corporation,” presented by Rajendran S. P., Assistant General Manager at Bold BI^®. The webinar is Thursday, August 8, at 10 AM ET.

During this session, you will learn how to transform retail inventory data into actionable insights using advanced business intelligence (BI) and extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. This will be performed with Bold BI and its integrated Bold ETL tool, seamlessly managing data flow from disparate sales and inventory data sources into the Bold BI data store database. Once the data is transformed and connected to Bold BI, it will be used to create compelling dashboards that provide a cohesive, real-time overview that enhances operational efficiency and profitability. Additionally, you will learn how Bold BI and Bold ETL address data analysis challenges such as data accuracy, data consistency, and demand forecasting.

Objectives:

• Understand ETL processes: Learn how integrated ETL solutions can consolidate various data sources, ensuring clean and reliable data for analysis.
• Generate real-time data insights: Discover how Bold BI can provide real-time insights into sales and inventory data, allowing for timely and informed decision-making.
• Optimize retail stock levels: Explore strategies to prevent stockouts and reduce excess inventory, ensuring optimal stock levels at all times.
• Improve operational profitability: See how data-driven insights can help in reducing operational costs and increasing profitability.
• Examine case studies and learn best practices: Learn from real-world examples and best practices to implement successful inventory management strategies in your organization.

Join us on August 8 at 10 AM ET!

Don’t miss this opportunity to unlock the full potential of your inventory data. Register now!

Start your journey with Bold BI^® by signing up for a free trial and creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. If you have any questions about this blog or the webinar, please feel free to post them in the comment section below. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Being able to access, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions quickly. However, in a multitenant architecture, when different tenant clients work with same data, creating the same data sources in each tenant to connect with its dashboards is highly unproductive. Also, keeping each tenant in sync with changes to the data source is a tedious process. Bold BI^® provides a solution to this issue by enabling users to publish data sources across multiple tenants. With just a few simple steps, you can streamline your data management processes and enjoy a hassle-free experience when working with multiple tenants.

Why publishing data sources across multiple tenants is necessary

In an organization with a multitenant BI deployment and shared database model, each department has its own tenant and set of dashboards but is connected to the shared database. In this case, publishing data sources between multiple tenants is necessary to share data sources across tenants to avoid redundant work. It also enables users to share data sources securely and  save time and effort. It also helps keep data up to date across all tenants, allowing users to make more informed decisions. This feature is very useful when multiple tenants need to collaborate and share data sources to achieve their goals.

How to publish a data source to other Bold BI sites

To publish a data source to one or more sites, click the Action icon in the data source grid and select Publish to publish the corresponding data source.

Bold BI allows you to publish the data source to internal and external sites.

Internal site

This option allows you to publish a data source to sites created in the same Bold BI server. You can share data sources securely with other teams within the organization, enabling collaboration across teams or departments, improving productivity and decision-making. Check out this documentation for the steps to publish a data source to internal sites.

External site

This option allows you to publish a data source to sites created in other Bold BI servers for secure collaboration with other companies, clients, or customers. This documentation explains how to publish data sources to external sites.

View the statuses of published data sources

You can view the statuses of published data sources on the Published Resources page. The published resources are listed in the grid and grouped by the data source by default.

View publishing information and history

You can also see the publishing information and publish history of a particular data source on the Published Resources page. To view the information, click the Action icon in the grid and select Info.

To view the publish history, click the Action icon in the grid and select Publish History.

How to synchronize new updates to the published data sources in other sites

When you make changes in an original data source, you can push those changes to the published site using the Synchronize option for a published resource. You can select the option next to the published resource name or from the published resource Action menu.

A confirmation dialog will appear. Click Yes to synchronize the data source.

You will receive the notification highlighted in the following screenshot.

Synchronizing a resource allows connected, published sites to keep up with any changes made to the original data source without having to manually update the published sites every time a change is made to the original data source. With this feature, you can ensure that all of your clients or team members have access to the latest up-to-date and accurate information.

If you want to change the connection string of your data source in a designated tenant, you can do so in Bold BI if the lock data source editing option is not enabled.

If you have enabled the lock data source editing option and published the data source in another site, and you want to modify the connection string, you can do it through the custom attribute feature. Custom attributes help you avoid overriding the connection details whenever you sync the data source. Refer to this documentation for more information on how to use this feature.

If you want to remove the published data source from the list, just click Action in the grid, select Remove, and then click Yes in the confirmation dialog.

Also, you can publish dashboards between multiple tenants in Bold BI. Read this documentation for more information.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to streamline your data management processes and boost productivity with the Bold BI^® data source publishing feature. Start leveraging it today and witness its transformative impact on your organization’s BI strategy. If you’re new to Bold BI, you can sign up for a free trial on our website.

We’re excited to announce that Syncfusion^® has successfully completed a System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 2 audit for Bold BI, its business intelligence and embedded analytics platform. This achievement exemplifies our commitment to maintaining the highest security, privacy, and compliance standards for our customers.

What is SOC 2® Type 2 compliance?

SOC 2® Type 2 compliance certifies an organization—Syncfusion for Bold BI in this case—for its ability to assure security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality of sensitive customer information based on standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

The SOC 2® Type 2 report assesses the controls of an organization and its effectiveness in safeguarding customer data and adhering to regulatory requirements.

Why is SOC 2® Type 2 certification important?

It is vital for every SaaS provider to go beyond just supporting infrastructure with security procedures. It must also prove its compliance with data privacy standards regularly. This is precisely why conducting the SOC 2® Type 2 audit is an important step in our ongoing commitment to providing customers with the highest level of security and compliance.

Syncfusion’s successful completion of this voluntary certification underscores our unwavering dedication to creating and maintaining a secure operating environment for our customers’ confidential data with Bold BI^®.

Our commitment

We are dedicated to consistently evaluating and enhancing our security policies, procedures, and infrastructure to meet the ever-changing requirements of our customers and industry standards. Our customers can trust us and now have increased confidence in the security and privacy of their data while working with us to meet their software development needs.

If you have any questions about our commitment to privacy and security, visit our Bold BI Security page. Visit our website to sign up for a free trial if you’re new to Bold BI.

We are excited to announce that we have rolled out our latest product update, Bold BI^® v5.2, which includes releases on Windows, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes, and Azure. It’s a huge release, since it delivers many much-awaited features, improvements, and breaking changes. These significant changes provide you with a great experience creating elegant dashboards with Bold BI.

You can download the latest version of Bold BI from your account page. If you are new to Bold BI, get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and see how you can create more interactive business intelligence dashboards.

In this blog post, we’ll look at the key enhancements this release:

• Data source enhancements
• Server enhancements
• IDP and UMS enhancements
• Designer enhancements
• Widget enhancements
• Embedded BI enhancements

Data source enhancements

New data source connectors

We added connectors for the ClickHouse and BoldDesk data sources. Now you can use these data source connectors to import data using various API endpoints.

Service account authentication support for Google BigQuery

We added support to use service account authentication in the Google BigQuery data source.  

View raw data in grids

Now, view raw data in a grid widget. You can enable or disable the Show Raw Data option in a grid’s Properties panel.

Create live web data sources using REST API

Create live web data sources using a REST API. Users can create a live web data source from third-party tools like Postman. In a live mode web data source, only 5,000 records are allowed by default.

Distinct aggregation expression support

We have implemented Distinct aggregation expression support for sums and averages. Now, you can get the sum and average for just a distinct value of a given data set.

Join the tables based on the expression column

Users can join tables based on an expression column. This support will be helpful for users who have to modify the column name in the database and then use join. Now they can rename the column and use it for joining.

Data source improvements

• 4x performance improved in the SQL data source extract mode initial creation. 
• Fixed date variable filter issue in SSAS data source. 
• Fixed data refresh issues in MySQL extract mode with PostgreSQL as data store. 
• Fixed filter issue in expression date column in PostgreSQL data source. 
• Fixed string-to-date conversion in which a column contains empty string/null values in PostgreSQL data source. 
• Added support for Snowflake date-time display based on client time zone.  
• Added support for Elasticsearch version 6.8.  
• Fixed issue with sequence containing no matching element in PostgreSQL data source. 
• Fixed task cancellation issue in Elasticsearch data source. 
• Fixed data source edit issue in PostgreSQL data source. 
• Fixed issue with data types not being maintained in tables. 
• Fixed edit connection issue while changing the server with the same schema in MySQL data source. 
• Fixed issue in casting the data types in Snowflake data source. 
• Fixed Top N Filtering bug in Google BigQuery data source. 
• Fixed issue with the table grid search function not working in SSAS. 
• 10x performance improved in live web data sources in the dashboard design mode. 
• Fixed inability to connect pagination without total page and data integrator fields on Web API data source. 
• Fixed Freshdesk pagination not working. 
• Fixed issue with lookup table creation if Bold BI is configured with MYSQL. 
• Fixed issue with missing custom fields in Jira. 
• Fixed error while filtering through URL in Web API live. 

Server enhancements

Support for MySQL as data store

Use MySQL as a data store. Users can configure their MySQL database in the data store settings as an intermediate data source.

Setting up CORS headers

We have implemented support to set up CORS headers on the settings page. Previously, all origins, methods, and headers were allowed. Now, users can configure and customize CORS setting based on policy. With this update, they can easily handle security by allowing and restricting specific origins, methods, and headers.

Webhook support

Create webhooks to deliver data alerts and for standard dashboard export. You can enable authentication and signing for your webhook and receive webhook content in JSON, XML, and X-FormUrl-Encoded formats. You can view webhook lists and statuses in the webhooks log.

Avoid SSRF attacks

Configure the known domain list to avoid SSRF attacks. Using this option, you can easily prevent a Bold BI request from being sent out to unknown domains.

Manage custom and predefined widgets

We have provided support to upload and manage custom and predefined widgets on the settings page. With this support, you can enable and disable custom and predefined widgets on the Widget tab on the Settings page. Disabling widget will hide it in Dashboard Designer. Users can configure any number of widgets for their application.

Minor enhancements  

• A REST API to update the CORS settings.  
• A REST API to check whether a pinboard name exists.  
• A REST API to update email settings.
• A REST API to update AzureAD settings.  
• A REST API to update AzureAD schedule synchronization settings.
• A REST API to manage account settings.  

Server improvements

• Fixed issue in Azure AD user synchronization.  
• Fixed issue in user-based filter by converting emails to lower case.  
• Fixed internal server errors when accessing multitab dashboards in the same page preview.  
• Fixed the duplicate left panel issue when editing the dashboard in the same page preview.   
• Fixed issue in using tab widgets in multitab dashboards.  
• Fixed random issue in daily dashboard export.  
• Added support to customize author name visibility, sorting order, and multitab labels on dashboard listing page.   
• Added support to add URL filter parameters while calling dashboard export REST API.  

IDP and UMS enhancements

Lock accounts support

Now, users can lock accounts if a password is entered incorrectly five times or more. Users can enable and disable the User Account Lockout option in the security settings page. A user will need to reset their password or ask an admin unlock their account if the account was locked.

Customizing password policies

Users can customize the password policies to match their organization’s IT policies. Users can set a maximum length and enable or disable requirements for at least one lowercase, uppercase letter, number, and special character. This password policy will work wherever passwords are required in the site.

Note: Users can set a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 64 character limits for the length policy.

IDP and UMS improvements

• Support to provide license key in Kubernetes and Docker via environment variables. 

Designer enhancements

Data caching support

We have implemented data caching support. You can turn the data cache in the designer on or off. The data cache result will be refreshed based on the set expiration minimum. The dashboard will render from the data cache when the data cache is enabled. The data cache feature allows users to improve dashboard performance by caching the widget results at initial widget rendering.

Interwidget linking support

We have added interlinking support in tab widgets. You can switch tabs based on index value. Using this support, you can configure default and custom actions for each tab widget in the Properties panel. When a default action is configured, the tab will switch based on the index value in the current widget. Custom actions allow you to switch to a specific tab index so that any value selected in the current widget will switch the tab to the configured tab. Users can view the tabs in view mode, even when a tab was hidden in the Designer.

Designer improvements:   

• Added dashboard parameter support in SSAS data source. 
• 1.5x performance improved in the dashboard rendering. 
• Added support to render a dashboard without setting the item details during initialization from embedding. 
• Fixed the issue with the widget action context menu not being shown while maximizing the dashboard in embedding. 
• Fixed widget menu pop-up rendering with default height when all the menu items are removed on customization. 
• Fixed the issue with custom widgets not loading while configuring preconfigured widgets API in designer embedding. 
• Fixed URL linking not working for multitab dashboard issue. 
• Fixed dynamic connection string not working after publishing a dashboard issue. 
• Fixed dashboard not being published to another site with more than three tables. 
• Fixed Excel exporting ignoring the applied filter issue. 
• Fixed widget data being discarded after updating the dashboard parameter value issue. 
• Fixed dashboard not being published to another site with disabled tables issue. 
• Fixed tab widget not properly aligning in multitab dashboard issue. 
• Fixed comment option not showing in tabbed widget issue. 
• Fixed slave widgets not filtering based on master widget values issue. 
• Fixed refreshing dashboard content issue in mobile view. 
• Added support to customize the custom widget container size in mobile mode. 

Widget enhancements

Major enhancements

Grid summary row support

We have implemented grid summary row support. You can enable or disable the Enable Summary Row option in the Properties panel. You can easily customize the grid summary configuration.

POP filtering for grids

You can enable POP filtering for a grid widget. With this support, you can view period-over-period primary and secondary values for the actual configured measure column in a grid. You can easily customize POP configuration settings.

POP filtering for KPI card

Enable POP filtering for KPI cards. When the enabled KPI card is a slave for a period-over-period widget and the user tries to configure target values in the KPI card, the user will get an alert message to ignore the configuration. The period-over-period secondary value will act as the target value in the KPI card, so there’s no need to configure a target value.

Widget improvements

• Provided support to adjust widget container padding.   
• Added support to apply chart filtering from axis labels.   
• Provided option to modify the pie and doughnut chart radius.   
• Provided option to modify the line and spline chart’s line width.   
• Provided option to enable a fixed layout for a KPI card.   
• Provided option to perform responsive margins in a KPI card.   
• Provided support to enable map zooming into marker plotted regions.   
• Provided support to enable a value tooltip for 100% stacked charts.   
• Enabled RTE server font family support.   
• Provided option to enable fixed rows and columns for proportional charts.  
• Enabled image widget tooltip.  
• Provided support for a description tooltip in the range navigator’s assign data section.  

Widget breaking changes

The custom widget folder placement and file format has been changed. We provided a utility to migrate custom widgets created in the lower version, as we have made changes in publishing the custom widgets. 

Embedded BI enhancements

Major enhancements

Embed a Dashboard Designer for external providers in iframe-based embedding.  

Embed a data source designer for external providers in iframe-based embedding.  

Now, users can easily embed a dashboard into any web application by copying and pasting the embed code. The administrators can easily embed the Dashboard Designer and a data source designer using various authentication providers such as Windows Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect.

Minor enhancements

• Option to update widget filters (text field only) while dashboard is rendering.
• Option to programmatically publish through an  API
• Option to customize the existing widget item panel.  
• API to show or hide the data source configuration in a designer.  
• API to show or hide all the columns by default when viewing underlying data.  
• API to show or hide the preview as an option in a designer.  
• Option to customize the toolbar buttons in a designer.  

Embedded BI improvements

• Option to get the embed code for the data source designer from the data source listing page.  
• Option to customize the header in AJAX calls.  

Conclusion

We hope this post was helpful to you in learning about the new features and improvements in the Bold BI^® v5.2 release. To learn more, refer to our release page.

For questions, you can contact us through the Bold BI website, or if you already have an account, you can log in.

We are delighted to announce that we will be rolling out our latest product update in July, Bold BI^® v5.2, which includes releases on Windows, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes, and Azure. It’s a significant release since it delivers many much-awaited features and improvements. These changes provide you with a great experience creating elegant dashboards with Bold BI. In this blog post, we’ll take a sneak peek at what you can expect from this upcoming release.

New features and improvements

There are many new features and improvements in our latest update. You can find the complete details in the release notes page published after the rollout.

Data source enhancements

• You can connect ClickHouse and BoldDesk with Bold BI using new, built-in connectors.

  

• We have provided support to use MySQL as a data store for the intermediate data source.

• You can use service account authentication in the Google BigQuery data source.  

• Now you can view raw data in the grid widget.  

• We have provided support to create live web data sources using REST API.  

• There’s now distinct aggregation expression for Sum and Avg.  

• You can join tables based on an expression column. 

Server enhancements

On the server-side, you can expect the following support in our upcoming release:

• Support to set up CORS headers on the settings page. 

• Support to deliver data alerts and standard dashboard export to webhooks. 

• Support to configure the known domain list to avoid SSRF attacks. 

• Support to configure MySQL as IMDB. 
• Support to upload and manage custom and predefined widgets on the settings page. 

• A REST API to update the CORS setting. 
• A REST API to check that a pinboard name exists. 
• A REST API to update email settings. 
• A REST API to update AzureAD settings. 
• A REST API to update AzureAD schedule synchronization settings. 
• A REST API to manage account settings. 

IDP and UMS enhancements

• Lock accounts if a password is entered incorrectly five times or more. 

• Customize the password policies to match your organization’s IT policies. 

Designer enhancements

In the designer, you can look forward to the following support in our upcoming release:

• Data caching support. 

Widget enhancements

In the widgets, you can expect the following support:

• Grid summary row support.  

• POP filtering for grid widget.  

• POP filtering for KPI cards.

• Interlinking support in tab widgets. 

Embedded BI enhancements

You can expect the following support in our upcoming release:

• Embed a dashboard designer for external providers in iframe-based embedding. 

• Embed a data source designer for external providers in iframe-based embedding. 

• Programmatically publish through an API. 
• Customize the existing widget item panel. 
• Use API to show or hide the data source configuration in a designer. 
• Use API to show or hide all the columns by default in view underlaying data. 
• Use API to show or hide the preview in a designer. 
• Customize the toolbar buttons in a designer. 

Conclusion

We hope you’re excited about the features and improvements that are going to be rolled out in the Bold BI^® v5.2 release. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website, or if you already have an account, you can log in.

Nowadays, analyzing data is one of the most important steps a business can take to ensure its success. To make continuous profit, useful metrics and KPIs should be tracked. Visualize your data analytics as a large screen slideshow where managers, team members, and an audience can view the slideshow presentation at the same time. Slideshows allow users to showcase their own selection of dashboards or other visualizations in sequence. Slideshow presentation is useful for visualizing dashboards at meetings or conferences, or on a large screen for a target audience in a workplace.

In a previous blog post, we explained how large-screen dashboards should be organized and how to set up dashboards as a slideshow for display on a TV. We discussed how to choose the right dashboards by looking at some examples of TV dashboards in different industries.

Bold BI^® also allows you to present slides in a slideshow presentation with multiple widgets, including charts, maps, images, text, and filters, in one container. In this blog post, we will explore how to prepare slides with multiple widgets and how to configure a slideshow in Bold BI. We will then learn how to interact with Bold BI slideshow widgets.

How to prepare slides with multiple widgets

You can present your slide visualizing key metrics on the left and the description on the right, as shown in the following image. By presenting your key information like this, it easy to understand for your target audience.

Multiple widgets in one container presentation

Follow these steps to add multiple widgets to one container using Bold BI:

1. In the Dashboard Designer canvas, add combine widget. To configure the combine widget, drag the combine widget from the dashboard’s item panel under Miscellaneous.

   

2. In the combine widget area, place the visualization widget on left and text widget on right.

   

3. In the text widget, add presentation content.

For example, for a sales team, sales and orders need to be tracked to identify the most-sold product and the suppliers who have the highest and lowest order percentages. Visualizing these metrics in a slideshow showcased on a large screen where the whole team can see it helps the team understand its progress toward its goals and lets members monitor performance continuously. Sales and suppliers KPIs can be showcased as separate dashboards and organized for a slideshow.

To achieve this, we are going to prepare the following KPIs in the separate dashboards:

• Orders by country
• Highest sales by category
• Top 5 suppliers by order percentage
• Bottom 5 suppliers by order percentage

For configuring the orders by country, you have to configure the combine widget from the miscellaneous category in the Bold BI Designer.

You need to add a choropleth map and text widget to the combine widget. Then, click Publish to view the published dashboard like the following image.

Similarly, you need to create separate dashboards for other metrics too.

Check out our help documentation for more details on configuring a combine widget with multiple widgets.

Now let’s look at how to configure a slideshow with prepared dashboards in Bold BI.

How to configure a slideshow in Bold BI

Once you create the separate dashboards, you need to create the slideshow.

To create a slideshow, select Slideshows  in the navigation bar to the left of the dashboard listing page.

On the right side of the page, click Create Slideshow to configure the dashboards and the transition interval between them.

Refer to this documentation to configure a slideshow in the Bold BI application.

After configuring the slideshow, you will be able to present full-screen, live dashboards one after the other at equal time intervals, as shown as following .gif.

Using this method, you can create slideshows and present business metrics easily as large-screen dashboards in Bold BI.

Interacting with a Bold BI slideshow presentation

You can interact with your slideshow presentation. Interactive data visualization helps you understand your data and make sound business decisions quickly. Here some of interactions to perform in your widgets:

• Filtering
• Drill down
• Linking

Filter interaction

With filtering, you can limit the data displayed in a widget or dashboard. This feature is used to provide different sets of data. Instead of having a separate visual or dashboard for each category, you can add filters and let users change the criteria to explore the data.

Let’s consider the Orders by Country KPI dashboard. We can add a list box filter widget and filter by country within the presentation, as shown in the image.

Drill-down action in presentation

Drilling down allows users to explore in-depth details of showcased chart elements with just a click. They can view a more detailed breakdown of the business data.

For example, by drilling down into one of the suppliers in the Top 5 Suppliers by Order Percentage dashboard, you can show the breakdown of that supplier’s products with the highest order percentage on the same visualization widget, as shown as following image.

Linking within presentation

Widget linking allows you to connect dashboards that are related to one another. You can link the dashboards with valid web URLs.

In the Highest Sales by Category KPI slide, you can link the dashboard to a widget tracking whether the ordered product is available or not on the same slide while presenting.

Check out our documentation to learn more interactions to take advantage of while presenting.

Conclusion

We hope you now have a better understanding of slideshows of sales dashboards and how they will help you to grow your business. These large-screen dashboards provide the audience a quick view of business through separate dashboards, each showcasing relevant key metrics arranged one after the other, rotating as a slideshow.

Bold BI^® has more than 20 dashboard examples categorized into industries, departments, and data analytics. Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. If you have any questions on this blog post, please feel free to post them in the comment section. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Introduction

Many people use reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools interchangeably without knowing the difference. Reporting and business intelligence are not based on charts alone; they go further. Automated reports from multiple data sources help businesses by producing reports effortlessly in a defined time period—whereas BI helps businesses explore data seamlessly and more efficiently. Each is a different tool with a different purpose.

In this blog post, I am going to give you a walkthrough on automated reporting and BI, describing where and how they can be used by looking at a simple use case and discussing the following aspects:

• What automated reporting is.
• The key benefits of automated reporting.
• What BI is.
• The key benefits of BI.
• Automated reporting with a use case.
• Business intelligence with a use case.
• Automated reporting vs BI: what an organization should consider.

Let’s dive into each topic in detail.

What is automated reporting?

Automated reporting provides relevant data to users in a defined time interval in an automated way without any manual effort. With automatically generated reports, you can evaluate how your business is performing, and you can easily compare that performance with previous reports; based on that comparison, you can define strategies.

Key Benefits of Automated Reporting

Saving time and money

Extracting a final report from raw data is a tedious process; it requires more resources. Gathering the data itself consumes so much time that it leaves less time to evaluate the reports. On the other hand, automated reports from multiple data sources favor many small businesses by saving resources and time.

Reducing risks and improving efficiency

When reports are prepared manually, there’s the potential they might contain mistakes, but automated reporting speeds up the process. At the same time, it reduces human errors and generates accurate reports so that companies can rely on them.

Increasing analysis frequency

Automated reports from multiple data sources give you the option to schedule frequent reports at small intervals—like every four hours, every day, every week, or more—so you can respond appropriately when a difficult situation arrives.

What is BI?

BI helps you analyze data over a period of time and gives you insights on how things can be done more profitably. BI identifies trends that can inform strategic business decisions and objectives that will improve the overall performance of the businesses based on multiple data sources (CRM data, marketing data, sales data, web API data, file storage data, etc.). This leads to the discovery of more business opportunities for your company.

Key benefits of BI

Better visualizations

Visualization makes analysis much easier for users. With BI tools, you can visualize complex data with various widgets such as pivot tables, grids, charts, maps, and more. You can also customize the widgets based on your needs, like the color scheme, indications, and graphics.

Improved data connectivity

With modern BI tools, a dashboard can be integrated easily with a vast range of data sets. This will open many opportunities to explore the data. You can also embed the dashboards to provide a unified user experience.

Scheduling reports

BI tools help you schedule reports and set up automatic data refreshing. They can also send reports via various formats, such as image, PDF, and Excel, when reaching an applied threshold.

Automated reporting with a use case

For example, consider pharmaceuticals drug sales performance with automated reporting. You can analyze sales and profit over the current quarter, and the end of the quarter will show the pharmaceutical department what it must do to meet the current organization’s target.

Let’s consider another example from the education domain. You can analyze and monitor student enrollment by current year, and the end of the year will show the education administrators what they need do to meet the current enrollment goal. But from this information alone, it is not possible to predict next year’s enrollments.

Business intelligence with a use case

For example, analyzing pharmaceuticals drug sales performance, you can analyze and monitor sales and profit of a drug over the past quarters, and you can easily compare current quarter sales and profits with previous quarters. This will help your marketing and sales teams perform better in terms of sales productivity.

Our pharmaceutical sales performance dashboard gives you an overview of Rx (prescription) sales and non-Rx (non-prescription) sales performance over different states via key metrics. You can compare the changes over different quarters and channels, and you can analyze the sales and profit incurred.

With the pharma sales performance dashboard demo, key decision-makers can analyze and monitor metrics to stay informed on drug performance, actively track sales representative performance, and better manage inventory. With business intelligence solutions, you can gain insight into every dimension of a business and its position in the industry.

Let’s consider another example in education. Educational administrators can analyze and track enrollment changes each year. They can forecast enrollment over the next three years based on the previous year’s enrollment. Administrators can then easily plan for the future and allocate resources accordingly.

The K-12 Education Enrollment Dashboard helps you track enrollment trends, student-to-faculty ratios, the top five districts on enrollment, student acceleration, and the operating budget of each school. This provides a comprehensive view of the performance of each institution and student body. You can also forecast enrollment for the next three years.

To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the K-12 Education Enrollment dashboard demo.

You can connect data from multiple sources (accounting, sales and CRM, social media, support, storage sources, web sources, databases, and even more data connectors) using business intelligence. You can find more dashboard examples with multiple domains and integrations demos with sample data.

Now let’s look at the real differences between BI and automated reporting.

Automated reporting vs. BI

Automated reporting vs BI: what an organization should consider

Both automated reporting and BI have many proven advantages when properly implemented. Both will break down data and allow users to make the most of their insight. When automated reporting is incorporated with a business intelligence application, it will bring you the advantages of both approaches. Before choosing one, define your needs and budget based on your business. Implementing automated reporting or BI helps companies have more control and visibility over processes.

Why don’t you give it a try?

I hope now you have a better understanding of automated reports and BI tools. Bold BI^® provides many dashboards that support multiple domains. Bold BI helps you visualize your data so that you see the potential results available in your data and gain insight by tracking all your important metrics and KPIs in real time.

Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time by helping you avoid redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our documentation. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ supported data sources.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Nowadays, data determines the growth of a business or company. For a continuously profitable company, KPIs and metrics should always be tracked using its business data. Making the right business decisions drives an organization to success, and using business intelligence analytics tools allows evidence-based decision-making. In this blog post, we are going to explore what a data dashboard is and how to reap its benefits through the following topics:

• What is a data dashboard?
• How to represent your data dashboard.
• What are essential features of a data dashboard?
• Key benefits of using a data dashboard.
• Data dashboard examples.
• How to embed a data dashboard in your application.

What is a data dashboard?

A data dashboard is a set of reports showing different KPIs and metrics derived from business data in real time. It provides a unified view of the business data. A data dashboard is also used for business intelligence that analyzes, monitors, and visualizes metrics and KPIs from various key data points. Together with analytics applied for raw data analysis, dashboards enable you to make the right decisions quickly for your business. Data dashboards allow a business’s decision-makers to understand their data, implement effective business processes, and gain new business opportunities through the proper data visualizations.

Visualizing key metrics simply and attractively using visuals can give viewers—business leaders, analysts, executives—an important perspective on the data. When visualizing data, it is necessary to determine which types of visualization widgets are suitable to the data set so that it can be converted into meaningful visuals.

How to represent your data dashboard

Let’s see how to represent your data dashboard through the right data visuals. Basically, there are five data representation types:

• Comparison: Comparison charts help you see differences over time by comparing one or more data sets.
• Relationship: Relationship charts help you showcase the connections or correlations between two or more variables. 
• Indicators (card and gauge): Indicators can be used to measure numeric KPIs and show their progress. 
• Proportion: Proportion charts help you compare the different parts of a category and how they change over time.
• Distribution: Distribution charts help you see how variables are distributed over time and analyze trends.

Refer to the blog “Choosing Visuals for Embedded Dashboards – Tips & Tricks “ for more information on choosing the right chart for your metrics to make your dashboards better.

Next, let’s explore the essential features of a data dashboard.

What are essential features of a data dashboard?

• Drill down
• Filtering
• Linking
• Forecasting
• Trendlines
• Customized Markers
• Conditional Formatting

Drill down

Drill down allows users to explore in-depth details of showcased chart elements with just a click. They can view a more detailed breakdown of the business data.

In the Retail Inventory Management Dashboard, users can drill down in the pie chart shown in the following screenshot. The Jacket category is highlighted because we can click on it to drill down into its data.

After navigating into the multilevel breakdown of the Jacket category, you can see the average inventory value items categorized as jackets as shown in the screenshot below.

Bold BI^® allows you to add drill-down functionality to charts and tree maps. You can refer to the documentation to learn how to enable drilling down in widgets.

Filtering

With the filtering feature, you can limit the data displayed in a chart or dashboard. This feature is used to provide different combinations of data. Instead of having a separate visual or dashboard for each category, you can add filters and let users change their criteria to explore the data.

Refer to the blog “Data Filtering Options for a Seamless User Experience” to explore different filters supported in Bold BI and their uses, and how to configure them to create multiple views of data using a single dashboard.

Linking

Widget linking allows you to connect dashboards that are related to one another. You can link the dashboard with valid web URLs.

In the Retail Store Performance Dashboard, linking is applied to the combo chart shown in the following image.

The chart shows the product category’s sales volume and gross profit value. Clicking the T-shirts product category reveals the inventory details of that category by using the Retail Inventory Management Dashboard that is linked to it.

Check out our linking documentation for more details on configuring links in your dashboards.

Forecasting

Forecasting helps you predict future data based on past and present data, which is particularly helpful for data such as revenue and expenses.

In the K-12 Enrollment Dashboard, forecasting is applied to a line chart that forecasts what enrollment might look like over the next three years, based on previous years’ enrollment. This allows school leaders to plan for the future and allocate resources accordingly.

Check out our forecast documentation for more details on configuring this feature.

Trendline

With trendlines, you can explore the general pattern or overall direction of the data in a chart widget. In the Release Management Dashboard, a trendline is applied to a line chart that visualizes completed story points by sprint as shown as following screenshot.

Refer to the trendline documentation for more details on configuring trendlines in charts.

Customized markers

With customized markers, you can use customized icons in maps to identify specific information for dashboard viewers. In the Real Estate Management Dashboard, customized markers are used to visualize sold and unsold properties by region.

Refer to the blog “Visualize Geographical Data Using Maps in Dashboards” to learn about business strategies that can benefit from presenting geospatial data using Bold BI maps with custom markers.

Conditional formatting

With conditional formatting, you can modify various properties of visual elements such as colors, icons, and images based on conditions. In the Construction Project Monitoring Dashboard, conditional formatting is applied to the combo chart as shown in the following image.

The combo chart shows the budget variance, which is the difference between the planned budget, or baseline amount of expense, and the actual amount spent. The bar color depicts the budget variance status. A green bar indicates the expense utilized less than the planned budget, and a red bar indicates the expense exceeded the planned budget. These colors make it easy to identify the budget variance at a glance.

Refer to the formatting documentation for more details on configuring conditional formatting.

Refer to the blog “5 Interactive Data Visualization Features You Should Know” to explore the five most useful interactive data visualization techniques and how to apply them using Bold BI.

Now let’s explore the key benefits of using a data dashboard.

Key benefits of using a data dashboard

• Better decision-making: A data dashboard helps monitor all KPIs in one place, providing an overall picture of the company’s performance to managers and helping them make better decisions that improve the growth of the company.
• Future data predictions: With a data dashboard, you can predict future data by using the forecasting feature. Forecasting helps predict outcomes and adjust goals based on market trends. You can extract insights from a business’s historical data and track its financial health.
• Improved customer satisfaction: A data dashboard helps you analyze large data sets and prepare better visualizations, allowing users without technical knowledge to extract insights from their data. You can track response times to customers and their feedback, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
• Improved productivity: With a data dashboard, you can organize data in one place, make visuals based on that data, and further analyze potential challenges such as production quantity, rework quantity, and production costs. Knowing these challenges can help mitigate them and increase productivity.
• Improved revenue: With a data dashboard, you can analyze and monitor key financial metrics and the cash flow of your business. This helps administrators know how well the organization is performing and what areas need to improve.

Let’s check out a variety of data dashboard examples.

Data dashboard examples

Data dashboards help you achieve specific business goals no matter the industry or department. They let you see the story that lives in your data by presenting it graphically.

Education dashboard example

K-12 Enrollment Dashboard

The K-12 Enrollment Dashboard helps track enrollment trends, student-to-faculty ratios, the top 5 districts by enrollment, advanced course enrollments, and the operating budget of each school. This gives a comprehensive view of the performance of each institution and student body. It also forecasts enrollment for the next three years.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for education.

Healthcare dashboard example

Clinical Trials Dashboard

The Clinical Trials Dashboard provides a review of all trials, summarizing the clinical trial data by intervention type, clinical phase, clinical condition, trial status, location, and more.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for healthcare.

Pharmaceutical analysis dashboard example

Pharmaceutical Labor Dashboard

The Pharmaceutical Labor Dashboard provides summarized details for a pharmacy’s labor management with metrics such as operation costs, labor costs, revenue and gross profit per prescription, work hours per job title, and prescription growth rate.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for pharmaceutical analysis.

Finance dashboard example

Balance Sheet Dashboard

The Balance Sheet Dashboard shows the financial state of a company account through financial metrics and can track the financial account performance for a particular period of the year.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for finance.

Information technology dashboard example

Forum Management Dashboard

The Forum Management Dashboard helps moderators effectively manage and maintain their forums by tracking key metrics and KPIs such as average posts per forum, average views per forum, overall questions and answers for posts, posts with the most votes, and more.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for information technology.

Sales dashboard example

Sales Manager Summary Dashboard

The Sales Manager Summary Dashboard helps sales leads and managers track the company’s revenue, including revenue trends, opportunity details, sales opportunity pipeline, revenue by country, accounts by revenue, win count, lost revenue, revenue won, win count trends, top sales leaders by revenue won, revenue by industry, new accounts, and opportunity status by owner.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for sales.

Survey analysis

Business Survey Analysis Dashboard

The Business Survey Analysis Dashboard helps viewers understand customer opinions about a product or service. Also, it showcases customer feedback on the product, identifies gaps in the offering, and thus helps the company make changes to processes or the product or service accordingly.

Check out more of our interactive dashboard examples for survey analysis.

You can also explore more sample dashboards categorized by industry and department under the Solutions menu on the Bold BI home page.

You can also embed a data dashboard into your business software application to gain insights without wasting time navigating to a separate application or website. Now, let’s look at what embedded analytics is and how to embed a data dashboard in your application.

How to embed a data dashboard in your application

Integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability is known as embedded analytics. 

Let’s see how these analytics can be embedded into your application. Bold BI helps you embed dashboards in your apps for 12 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario in which your company has a website like the one shown in the following image.

You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully in an Angular application.

Prerequisites

Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.

Step 1: Create an Angular application

To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you first need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project, as shown in the following image.

For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.

In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file, as shown in the following table and screenshot.

import { Component, Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { Router, ActivatedRoute } from '@angular/router';
import { appService } from './app.service';
import { Item } from './app';

@Component({
    selector: 'app-root',
    templateUrl: './app.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./app.component.css'],
    providers: [appService]
})

@Injectable()

export class AppComponent {

    //ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:61777/, which needs to be set as "apiHost"
    public apiHost = "http://localhost:5000";

    //Dashboard Server BI URL (ex: http://localhost:5000/, https://demo.boldbi.com/bi/)
    public rootUrl = "http://localhost:5000/bi";

    //For Bold BI Enterprise edition, it should be like 'site/site'. For Bold BI Cloud, it should be empty string.
    public siteIdentifier = "site/site1";

    //Url of the GetDetails action in ValuesController of the ASP.NET Core application
    public authorizationUrl = "/api/home/getdetails";

    //Url of the GetDashboards action in ValuesController of the ASP.NET Core application
    public getDashboardUrl = "/api/home/getdashboards";
    public baseUrl = "";
    public dashboardServerApiUrl = "";
    public dashboards: Item[];
    constructor(private _app: appService) {
    }
    ngOnInit() {
    }
}

After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.

Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance

After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (the Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.

Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server

Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI instance.

Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard

In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.

By following the previous steps, you can successfully embed your dashboards into your Angular application.

To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.

Conclusion

Now you know about data dashboards, their benefits, and how to embed them in your application to gain actionable insights, make the right decisions, and prosper in your business. Bold BI^® helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time by helping you avoid redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our documentation. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ supported data sources.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

Introduction

Axosoft is a leading agile project management software that helps agile teams to organize and plan their projects to keep their work on schedule and deliver faster. It allows users to create a project and work items, track work with configurable Kanban boards by assigning work to teammates, specify deadlines, and communicate about tasks within Axosoft.

You can now connect your Axosoft data with Bold BI^® to track your team’s projects and performance. Bold BI is a business intelligence dashboard and analytics software for creating, managing, and sharing interactive business dashboards with users anywhere in the world. In this blog post, we are going to explore the following topics:

• What is embedded analytics?
• How to fetch Axosoft data
• How to connect Axosoft data with Bold BI
• How to create Axosoft Release Management dashboard in Bold BI
• How to embed Axosoft Release Management dashboard into your application

What is embedded analytics?

Integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities in any software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability is known as embedded analytics. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. This helps you to reduce your dependency on IT teams and glean all the insights you need to improve administrative and workforce outcomes.

Now, let’s look at how to fetch data from an Axosoft account.

How to fetch Axosoft data

Axosoft provides REST APIs to fetch data from your Axosoft account. Developers can analyze and retrieve data in Axosoft software for releases, projects, items, and more. The base URL format for the Axosoft Web API is:

https:// <BaseAxosoftURL>/api/<version>/ <API_EndPoint>

Refer to the following table to connect Axosoft data and create a data source with appropriate APIs.

Let’s see how to connect fetched Axosoft data in Bold BI.

How to connect Axosoft data with Bold BI

Bold BI allows you to connect with the Axosoft data through a Web API data source. To do that, you first need to create an access token. Refer to this support documentation to generate the Client ID and Secret that will be used to generate an access token. With the help of the postman app, generate the access token and use it to create an Axosoft data source. Follow these steps to create a data source in Bold BI:

1. Click the Data Sources button in the configuration panel to add a new data connection.
2. Click CREATE NEW.

3. Choose the Web connection from the list of data connectors in the connection panel under Rest.

4. As a result, the web data connection window will be displayed in the panel. Specify a unique name for the Axosoft data source and provide a description (optional).
5. Provide an Axosoft Web API endpoint in the URL text box. Leave the default value GET for the Web API under the Method.
6. Add an authentication key and value under the headers. Set “Authorization” as the value of the Key and “Bearer <AccessToken>” as the value of the Header.
7. Set the time interval for Refresh Settings so that the dashboard can refresh itself. This will trigger the REST API request periodically and keep the data in sync with our dashboard.
8. Let the data format be JSON since release and project API endpoints return results in JSON format. Leave the default values for Authentication and Paging Type.

Click Preview and Connect. The preview window opens, listing the data results as seen in the following image.

Choose the desired columns and click Connect. Drag the table and save the data source. Finally, the Axosoft data sources will be added to the DATA SOURCES.

Once the data source is created, add the required widgets to your dashboard and connect data to them to visualize the metrics.

How to create an Axosoft release management dashboard in Bold BI

Let’s create an Axosoft release management dashboard with Axosoft data. Refer to the video “How to Create a Dashboard – Bold BI Tutorial for Beginners” if you’ve never set up a Bold BI dashboard before.

This release management dashboard helps product managers track the statuses of different project releases through the following metrics:

• Total tasks
• Cycle time
• Project completion percentage
• Utilized work hours
• Total items by date and status
• Release scope changes
• Release status
• User workload
• Items by type
• Items by project
• Estimated vs. actual utilized duration by user
• Items by priority

With a dashboard like this, you can showcase the progress of important tasks in projects involving different teams. You can break down results related to specific items by status and user. You can also analyze the release metrics of a project and monitor team tasks.

Let’s see how each of these KPIs can be plotted using Bold BI dashboard widgets.

Total tasks

The KPI card shows the total number of tasks closed versus planned. With this KPI, the team leaders can see how many tasks are completed and how many still need to be completed by the deadline.

Cycle time

The stacked bar chart visualizes the remaining work hours by user and status. Using this metric, team leaders and managers can review how long, on average, items stay in any given status of a workflow.

Project completion percentage

This radial gauge shows the overall task completion rate of all projects. Product managers and team members can track the actual completion percentage compared to the planned one. It is useful to them to plan accordingly to complete whole projects.

Utilized work hours

The radial gauge visualizes the overall utilized work hours of the planned work hours. With this KPI, team leaders can track and plan how many hours they need to spend to complete the whole project.

Total items by date and status

This stacked area chart showcases the total items by date with their statuses: open, in progress, testing, and closed.

Release scope changes

This stacked column chart visualizes scope changes by date. Apart from those planned, story points that are added and removed each day are also shown. Team leaders can review day-by-day measures of the amount of work that remains in a given release.

Release status

This doughnut chart shows the percentage of tasks in each status. Team leads can take the necessary actions to move tasks that are open, in progress, or testing to completed.

User workload

This bar chart visualizes the assigned task count for each user. Using this metric, team leads can view work assigned to each person and they can distribute tasks accordingly to users.

Items by type

This bar chart shows a comparison of the planned and actual task completion by type: task, epic, bug, and user story. With this metric, you can easily track which type of task is taking longer to complete, helping you plan task distribution.

Items by project

This column chart shows a comparison of the planned tasks and actual tasks completed by project. Using this KPI, a manager plan work accordingly to release on time.

Estimated vs. actual utilized duration by user

The bar chart shows a comparison of the planned time for tasks and actually utilized time by user. You can track utilized work hours and review how each user is performing.

Items by priority

This column chart shows a comparison of the planned and actual tasks completed by priority: low, medium, and high. Using this KPI, team leads can view and plan to complete the higher-priority tasks.

To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Axosoft release management dashboard demo.

How to embed the Axosoft Release Management dashboard into your application

Let’s see how these analytics can be embedded into your application. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in apps for 12 web platforms, including ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed the Axosoft Release Management dashboard in an ASP.NET MVC application. Consider a scenario in which your IT department application has a website like the one shown in the following image.

Prerequisites

Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.

Step 1: Creating an ASP.NET MVC application.

To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first you need to create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.

Step 2: Configure embed properties.

After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.

Step 3: Generate embed secret.

You have to set the EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.

Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.

Step 4: Create authorization server.

You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for users to log into different applications separately.

Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.

Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.

Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.

After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.

By following the previous steps, you can successfully embed your dashboards into your ASP.MVC application.

To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code mentioned in all these steps from our documentation.

Conclusion

So, now you know how to connect to Axosoft data and visualize important information from your account using Bold BI^®. Bold BI helps you to integrate dashboards in your applications written in React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with Core, and more, seamlessly. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work.  You can create a dashboard as you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ data sources. Click this link to explore more of its features.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.