Mobile Technique and Features

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1 Smart evision International, Inc. Mobile Technique and Features Smart evision White Paper Prepared By: Martin Hu Last Update: Oct 16, P a g e

2 Overview Mobile Business intelligence extends and optimizes traditional desktop Business Intelligence so they can be viewed and utilized easily in mobile devices. The concept of Mobile Intelligence was initiated around since mobile phone debuted in early 90s and increasingly adopted in the workplace in recent years due to the breakneck mobile technology enhancement. Nowadays, mobile BI has become an essential element of improving decision-making for employees at all levels and plays an important role in companies IT strategy. As Gartner predicts, By 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices. A recent Forbes article also indicates, By 2015, over 50 percent of mobile BI users will rely exclusively on mobile devices for insight delivery, and will grow BI users by 20 percent. By 2016, 70 percent of leading BI vendors will have incorporated natural-language and spoken-word capabilities. By 2016, more than half of real-time business dashboards will provide a panoramic view that provides information from multiple sources. For those considering mobile BI or extending BI solution into mobile, a successful mobile BI solution should be able to fulfill the following requirements. Take action anywhere, anytime One major difference between desktop BI and mobile BI is portability. Users should be able to reach their target information at any time and no matter where they are. Therefore, mobile BI solution must include the ability to update new data with data server and store these data by offline caching so as to view later on the go. Design once and access by any devices Companies that have existing BI infrastructure will require the mobile BI application to be able to extend their current BI infrastructure. Also companies that have already adopted the corresponding desktop BI solution will want to deploy their solution into mobile devices with ease. No extra design for each platform is needed. Let the application adapt different devices, screen factors and touch optimization for you. Supported by mature security mechanism Mobile BI improves collaboration into a new level, but this will increase the potential of security problem if there is no sophisticated security mechanism in place. Make sure the mobile solution applies matured users authentication and data authorization. No learning curve. Explore information with gestures. Mobile BI solution should deliver intuitive, interactive, and rich information and take advantage of the mobile devices intuitive touch screen interface. Simply touch, pinch, slide, and zoom to realize various functions such as filter, drill down, zoom in, zoom out and etc. 2 P a g e

3 Development Path As early as 2007 when the first version of Smart evision desktop dashboard solution was released upon the market, through market analysis and customers feedback, we ve sensed and predicted the potential needs on Mobile BI and the great benefits it will add on our clients and started evaluating different development options. The three major options for delivering BI dashboards to mobile devices are to create HTML5 web app, or pure native mobile app designed for the specific mobile operating system, hybrid HTML5 app by wrapping a HTML5 web app in a native client. We ve compared pros and cons between these methods and finally decided to go with a hybrid HTML5 app. The following section will explain the reason why we choose it: HTML5 web app HTML5 has been widely recognized as an industry standard which is supported by different mobile vendors. In other words, creating app with HTML5 approach enables cross-platform ability which makes the mobile application working on multiple devices. For our dashboard application, users are able to design dashboards once and deploy to any devices. Other benefits for developers include written with web technologies that most developers are familiar with and centralized updates and so on. However, HTML5 web app has its vital disadvantages. To name some, it is quite difficult to manage user session; it has limitation on complex mission application; and it doesn t have secured offline storage. Native mobile app Compared to HTML5, Native mobile app uses the core programming languages, APIs and features directly associated with a given mobile OS. In terms of development, this approach involves writing each platform app with corresponding SDKs. For dashboard designers, dashboard redesign for different platforms must be a great pain. On the contrary, Native mobile app is device specific so it has potential to fully utilize its features and created in more graphically rich fashion. Meanwhile, the secured offline storage makes application more portable especially for dashboards application which may carry rich data. Hybrid HTML5 app Going Hybrid HTML5 app provides the pros and cons of both HTML5 app and Native mobile app. However, Hybrid makes it possible to make the best of the both worlds. During our mobile development, we were optimizing JavaScript, CSS to maintain the rich and interactive content with beautiful layout, meanwhile, writing compliance HTML code so as to assure that it could be working on any platform which goes with HTML. On the other hand, this doesn t have to sacrifice the excellent capabilities from Native mobile app. By wrapping the HTML, JavaScript and CSS code into native mobile app container, our mobile BI Solution is able to use these cool features Native mobile app has such as caching data to offline, reacting much faster, rendering high quality Graphics and animation, adopting rich user experience. Moreover, HTML5 technology has a high industry acceptance with, definitely, a promising 3 P a g e

4 long-term future. So does this native platform language which all mobile device vendors will be constantly improving for sure. Smart evision Mobile BI Dashboard Smart evision App is now available in ios, Android, and Windows 8 Mobile platforms and supporting multiple screen factors. These apps allow users to seamlessly connect with any dashboards designed with Smart evision dashboard solution without any extra design. It was developed absolutely based on the requirements mentioned in the first section of this white paper, which make Smart evision as one of the best and completed BI dashboards tool in the world. Gestures and Features By taking full account of users instinctive control habit and reducing the possibility of learning curve, we adopted intuitive finger gesture so as to allow users browsing our dashboard with great ease. The table below illustrates all finger gestures Smart evision Mobile Dashboard supporting: Finger Gestures Single Tap Single Tap is most frequently used gesture. Most of actions and interactions are triggered by single tap, for example: Choose a region, a record, a category Click on buttons Select filter parameters And so on Swipe Up/Down/Left/Right Swiping is usually used to view extent content, for example: Swipe Up and Down to view more records in Data Grid Swipe left and right to view more fields in Data Grid Browsing Folders and Pages in the Cockpit. 4 P a g e

5 Spread/Pinch Spread and Pinch are used for selecting certain range, for example: Spread or Pinch to choose the range to zoom in displaying in the Chart Drag Slide Drag and Slide are used to move Slider bar, for example: Sliding Data Slider to select other records Sliding Simulation Slider to change simulation parameter value Sliding Simulation Slider List to change simulation parameter values Advanced Gestures Press Hold By pressing and hold on Controls, users are able to trigger more advanced features. Four features are available. Zoom in/out Decomposition Hint Link Zoom in/out By clicking Zoom in circle, the control will be enlarged to be full screen size. 5 P a g e

6 Decomposition Decomposition circle only appears when press and hold on Map control. Smart evision Map Control provides two level details, therefore, decomposition means to going into the detail level map. Hint By Clicking on the Hint circle, any hint attached to the control where you press hold on will be shown. 6 P a g e

7 Link Clicking link circle will open the target dashboard that is linked to. Also, depending on the record you press and hold on, the corresponding information will be forwarded to the target page as well. Other Features Cockpit Cockpit is our unique folders and pages menu, which greatly enhances visual effect and improve browsing efficiency. Our cockpit supports many different types: 3D 2D Cover Flow List Cache Cache stores pages in the device storage so as to allow users to view these pages with and without accessing server. Users can update new data by caching, then browsing dashboards on the go. This is one of the most important features a mature dashboard solution must have. 7 P a g e

8 Memo and This feature is used to share dashboards with other people who don t have or don t use dashboard solution. Simply ing out the dashboard with notes will allow these people acknowledging the information delivered. 8 P a g e