Highlights of MicroStrategy 10.4:
New features introduced in MicroStrategy 10.4 Desktop Analytics (Standalone tool):
MicroStrategy Platform
RESTful JSON Data API
Usher Security App
New features introduced in MicroStrategy 10.4 Desktop Analytics (Standalone tool):
- Smart Defaults - Desktop now has an updated look-and-feel that modernizes the appearance of dashboards to provide an improved user experience.
- Dynamic Links - You can create dynamic links to external content in a Grid visualization.
- Combine Dashboards - You can now import multiple dashboards or reports to a dashboard as new sheets, while retaining the original formatting. This feature allows you to quickly and easily share dashboards and reports.
- Imports from databases can now be cancelled, which allows a user to stop an import process that is frozen or that takes longer than expected.
- Desktop includes an enhanced interface for browsing, importing, and deleting custom visualizations:
- To browse the Custom Visualization Gallery on MicroStrategy Community, click the blue + button (located at the bottom of the Visualization Gallery) and choose Browse Gallery.
- To import a custom visualization, click the blue + button (located at the bottom of the Visualization Gallery) and choose Import Visualization.
- To delete a custom visualization, right-click the custom visualization in the Visualization Gallery and choose Delete.
- For graphs, you can now specify values outside the minimum and maximum value range to maintain a consistent scale over time, even if the data is republished and the minimum and maximum values change.
MicroStrategy Platform
- Express silent install - When installing a new instance of the MicroStrategy platform using the express installation option, we can perform the install by a silent installation, enabling the installation inside custom applications or other installations. New parameters have been added for us in the response.ini.
- Universal MicroStrategy 10 license key - Starting with 10.4, one can use the same license key for all future 10.x releases.
- Improved mobile experience for MicroStrategy Tutorial - The tutorial project now includes dedicated mobile pages. Additionally, installing 10.4 using the express option and upgrading your metadata will automatically configure mobile links.
- Updated Drivers
- Spark SQL 1.6
- MemSQL 4.x
- SAP Hana 11
- Presto 0.143
- Support for SIMBA driver for Hive
- Support for 8-node clusters - Intelligence server clusters increased support from 4 nodes to 8 nodes.
- Work Fences - You can reserve nodes in a cluster for specific users with user fences or for subscriptions with workload fences.
- Added parallel execution support for pre and post SQL - Support Expanded support for parallel query execution to pre and post SQL statements.
- Improved performance for CSV data import - CSV Cube publishing time is improved when uploading a CSV file to an in-memory cube.
- Lower peak memory usage for incremental cube refresh.
- Improved performance for Visual Insight Dashboards - Dashboard rendering, resizing, and scrolling have been optimized for greater performance.
- Attribute thresholds - We can add thresholds to attributes in visualizations, allowing us to apply conditional formatting across headers. When applying a threshold to a parent attribute, the conditional formatting is applied at level of the visualization.
- Administrator can define the My Page layout - Users with Administrator privileges can change the layout of the MicroStrategy default start page. With the template, you can add and remove what users see when they access My Page.
- Whitelist for URL data import - For security purposes, when importing data, URLs can be restricted to a set defined by the administrator.
- Smart Defaults - MicroStrategy Web now has an updated look-and-feel that modernizes the appearance of Visual Insights to provide an improved user experience.
- Dynamic Links - you can create dynamic links to external content in a Grid visualization.
- When Data wrangling, users have an increased sample size of up to 10,000 rows of random data. This gives users the ability to preview and enhance a greater amount of data when data wrangling.
- Combine Dashboards - You can now import multiple dashboards or reports to a dashboard as new sheets, while retaining the original formatting. This feature allows to quickly and easily share dashboards and reports.
- For graphs, you can now specify values outside the minimum and maximum value range to maintain a consistent scale over time, even if the data is republished and the minimum and maximum values change.
- HTML5 widgets in documents now have a preference menu for the Heat Map and Network widgets, which allows you to further customize widgets within documents.
- When viewing Report Services documents in Presentation mode, you can:
- Resize grid columns after drilling down on objects
- Drill in and sort graphs
- MicroStrategy Mobile D3 Visualization capabilities have been extended to include the following:
- Using D3 Visualizations as selectors
- Custom thresholds on D3 Visualizations
- Integration with third-party Visualizations for Android devices
- iOS users can access their reports, documents, and shared reports through the My Reports folder.
- iOS users can now apply multiple layers with different datasets on a map. This allows user to see data from various datasets by switching between layers on the same map, as well as see multiple layers for comparison on the same map.
- Export reports to Excel - iOS users can now export Grid reports to Excel, with the option to send the Excel report via email, or open the report through the Excel application directory on the iOS device.
- iOS users can now apply thresholds to Attribute elements, allowing a user to format entire rows of Grids.
- MicroStrategy Mobile now supports push notifications and alerts for Android devices.
- Kerberos without pass-through option for XQuery - Added support for Kerberos without pass-through to XQuery data source connections. You can use a single Kerberos certificate to authenticate all users for a web service.
RESTful JSON Data API
- A new RESTful API is now available to make it easy to get data from MicroStrategy projects. The API supports the following features:
- Standard JSON data format for requests and responses
- Ad-hoc attribute and metric fetching
- Incremental fetching
- Threshold and formatting information
- Support for AppConfig to integrate with EMM providers
- Support for authenticated integration with AirWatch
- Support for setting separate security policies with AirWatch
- Support for recovering password in iOS
- New APIs for custom drop zones
- Define drop zone transition behaviour when switching visualizations
- Set colours for attribute elements
- Support for Visualization Builder tool in MicroStrategy Desktop
Usher Security App
- When connecting to Pulse Secure, users can authenticate the secure connection by accepting the push notification sent to the Usher Security app.
- Administrators can now require users to enter a passphrase of a certain length to ensure extra security for VPN connections.
- The Usher app offers a better workflow for recovering badges and for receiving a badge for the first time, when no default server is available. The better workflow provides a more secure and streamlined user experience.
- User Administrator can require users to consent to Terms and Conditions, and the Privacy Policy, which is configured in Network Manager. Users can be required to agree to terms and policies before acquiring or recovering badges.
- Administrators of Usher networks can now configure the support contact information for their networks, allowing users to contact support directly, leave feedback, and report issues.
- When logging into an application with Usher Security, users can now see the status of their authentications via a SSO page, which allows them to be alerted to issues if they do not meet certain conditions.
- User can now unlock a Windows computer with their Usher app when they are within a set distance to their computers.
- The Places Hierarchy for User Analytics offers a simplified workflow directly from Usher Network Manager.
- Usher for Mac now locks a user's Mac computer when the Usher app moves a set distance away from the computer.
- Using out-of-the-box reports for Usher Analytics, Administrators can now analyse the time report data collected from iBeacons that are integrated with a physical resource system.
- Usher Analytics offers an improved employee organization hierarchy chart, with greater functionality and expanded abilities.
- Apache Kafka is certified for use with the Usher Analytics data warehouse on Linux environments. This offers administrators a simplified workflow for setting up the Extract Transform Load (ETL) process.