(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

The final objective of the information in the BI reports and dashboards is to detect the cause-effect business behavior and trends, and trigger actions to solve them. These actions supported by visual information, via scorecards and dashboards. This process requires an interaction with several people.

MicroStrategy includes the functionality to share our reports, scorecards, and dashboards, regardless of the location of the people.

Reaching your audience

MicroStrategy offers the option to share our reports via different channels that leverage the latest social technologies that are already present in the marketplace, that is, MicroStrategy integrates with Twitter and Facebook.

The sharing is like avoiding any related costs and maintaining the design premise of the do-it-yourself approach without any help from specialized IT personnel.

Main menu

The main menu of MicroStrategy shows a column named Status. When we click on that column, as shown in the following screenshot, the Share option appears:

The Share button

The other option is the Share button within our reports, that is, the view that we want to share. Select the Share button located at the bottom of the screen, as shown in the following screenshot:

The share options are the same, regardless of the location where you activate the option; the various alternate menus are shown in the following screenshot:

E-mail sharing

While selecting the e-mail option from the Scorecards-Dashboards model, the system will ask you for the e-mail programs that you want to use in order to send an e-mail; in our case, we select Outlook.

MicroStrategy automatically prepares an e-mail with a link to share it. You can modify the text, and select the recipients of the e-mail, as shown in the following screenshot:

The recipients of the e-mail will click on the URL that is included in the e-mail, send it by this schema, and the user will be able to analyze the report in a read-only mode with only the Filters panel enabled.

The following screenshot shows how the user will review the report. Also, the user is not allowed to make any modifications.

This option does not require a MicroStrategy platform user account.

When a user clicks on the link, he is able to edit the filters and perform their analyses, as well as switch to any available layout, in our case, scorecards and dashboards. As a result, any visualization object can be maximized and minimized for better analysis, as shown in the following screenshot:

In this option, the report can be visualized in a fullscreen mode by clicking on the fullscreen button [] located at the top-right corner of the screen. In this sharing mode, the user is able to download the information in Excel and PDF formats for each visualization object. For instance, if you need all the data included in the grid for the stores in region 1 opened in the year 2000. Perform the following steps:

1. In the browser, open the URL that is generated when you select the e-mail share option.
2. Select the ScoreCard tab.
3. In the Open Year filter, type 2012 and in the Region filter, type 1.
4. Now, maximize the grid.
5. Two icons will appear in the top-left corner of the screen: one for exporting the data to Excel and the other for exporting it to PDF for each visualization object, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

Please keep in mind that these two export options only apply to a specific visualization object; it is not possible to export the complete report from this functionality that is offered to the consumer.

Summary

In this article, we learned how to share our scorecards and dashboards via several channels, such as e-mails, social networks (Twitter and Facebook), and blogs or corporate intranet sites.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Participating in a business process (Intermediate) [Article]
• Self-service Business Intelligence, Creating Value from Data [Article]
• Exploring Financial Reporting and Analysis [Article]