What to expect from Datazen

One of the latest acquisitions of Microsoft is a Dashboarding company called Datazen. Datazen originally started in 2002 as ComponentArt, a developer tool vendor, building original UI and data visualisation technology.

With a decade of experience in building data visualisation technology they then decided to create the next-gen mobile BI product. Datazen was launched in 2013, and with a constant stream of releases improving the product it gained recognition among customers and partners. Untill one of the partners, Microsoft, bought it in April 2015.

Features

But what to expect from this tool? Here are some of the features that make Datazen a great and enterprise ready application:

Desktop & Mobile

Datazen supports both desktop and mobile dashboards. For desktop you can use the web browser to visualize the dashboards. Windows 8 users can even use the Datazen app to open and consume the dashboards. Also, for Mobile devices Datazen supports the three major OS-es: iOS, Android and Microsoft.

Integrated Security

Several types of security are available. You can use the Datazen security, Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services Authentication. Moving data around from Secure Device to Server can go through SSL. The data is also encrypted at REST on Datazen Server and on the client device.

Enterprise data sources

Datazen can connect to the major available enterprise data sources:

• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Analysis Server
• Microsoft SQL Azure
• Generic ODBC data Sources
• Excel documents in network shares

Data anywhere

Data can be cached on the server for optimal performance, or locally on the device for offline use. As a third option you can also have the dashboards run on real-time data queries. This gives you the possibility to make the dashboards more personal and get personalized data.

Dashboard and scorecard design

Easy to use design studio with rich interactive visualisations that give a perfect rendering in any screen Form-factor. It also give you the possibility to filter dashboards and drill-down or drill-trough to another dashboard or custom URL.

Team collaboration

Every KPI and dashboard has activity streams. Next to creating and update messages these streams also contain user comments that appear in chronological order.

Custom Branding

When it comes to custom branding, Datazen goes well beyond simple logo placement. All aspects of the app chrome are customized. This gives you the possibility to create a fully branded experience, which looks and feels like custom mobile apps were created for your BI deployment.

Application integration

Next to applying your own branding, you can also integrate the dashboard in your existing web-based applications. By adding a simple IFRAME to your web application you get all the Datazen functionalities.