MicroStrategy Distribution Services FAQ
- What is MicroStrategy Distribution Services?
- Which reports and documents can MicroStrategy Distribution Services deliver?
- How does MicroStrategy Distribution Services help business users save time?
- How does MicroStrategy Distribution Services help IT professionals get more BI from fewer resources?
- How long does it take to set up MicroStrategy Distribution Services?
- Which users can create subscriptions?
- When are subscriptions triggered, and MicroStrategy reports and documents delivered?
- Can users trigger deliveries based off of their own business rules?
- How can you achieve unmatched performance and stability with MicroStrategy Distribution Services?
- How can the IT professional easily monitor and administer subscriptions?
- Does MicroStrategy Distribution Services run in 32-bit and 64-bit modes?
- Can users change delivery settings, change subscription personalizations, or unsubscribe?
- Can users be automatically sent information without their input?
- How is MicroStrategy Distribution Services built to handle multiple languages and global information delivery?
- What additional tools are available to help manage and monitor subscriptions, users, and MicroStrategy Distribution Services Objects?
- How does MicroStrategy Distribution Services relate to MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server?
1. What is MicroStrategy Distribution Services?
MicroStrategy Distribution Services, a new product introduced in the MicroStrategy 9 BI platform, provides high-volume, high-performance, automated report and dashboard distribution via email, file servers, and networked printers. MicroStrategy Distribution Services places the control of information distribution into the hands of the business user. Business users can subscribe themselves or others to receive reports and/or dashboards on a schedule, on an event, or on an alert basis – all without any assistance from IT administrators.
2. Which reports and documents can MicroStrategy Distribution Services deliver?
MicroStrategy Distribution Services distributes any and all MicroStrategy output — including Reports and Dashboards — contained within multiple formats: HTML, PDF, Excel, CSV, Plaintext, Flash, and Zip.
3. How does MicroStrategy Distribution Services help business users save time?
For the business users, MicroStrategy Distribution Services offers a system that will make them more efficient in their day-to-day work, allowing them to spend less time looking for data and less time running reports in an ad-hoc fashion. With MicroStrategy Distribution Services, information finds the user, rather than the user having to find the information.
4. How does MicroStrategy Distribution Services help IT professionals get more BI from fewer resources?
For the IT/BI professional, MicroStrategy Distribution Services offers a new mode of achieving high-efficiency operations. Reports and dashboards can be scheduled to run overnight, during off-peak hours, thereby freeing up expensive database and BI server resources for interactive activity during the peak hours of the day.
5. How long does it take to set up MicroStrategy Distribution Services?
MicroStrategy Distribution Services is integrated directly into MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, sharing the same single Metadata. Because of this direct integration, MicroStrategy Distribution Services is available to any MicroStrategy user once MicroStrategy Intelligence Server and MicroStrategy Web are installed – without requiring any further setup.
6. Which users can create subscriptions?
Any user can set up subscriptions and high-efficiency information flows for themselves and their coworkers. Any business user can control all of their distribution subscriptions and set up distributions for other business users without having to go through a centralized IT administrator, as is common with other BI technologies.
7. When are subscriptions triggered, and MicroStrategy reports and documents delivered?
Business users can set a variety of report distribution triggers, including: send now, time-based schedules (e.g., every Monday morning), event-based triggers (e.g., when the books are closed), or alert-based triggers (e.g., if inventory levels drop 10% below normal). While schedule-based distributions are common in the BI industry, event-based triggers and alert-based triggers are far less common and empower the users to see reports only when they need to look at the data, thereby giving time back to the information user.
8. Can users trigger deliveries based off of their own business rules?
Yes. With MicroStrategy 9, business users can further personalize and automate their BI environment by setting up their own personal alert conditions for their alert triggers. Each business user can have his own personal information radar that automatically scans the databases for exception conditions that might only interest that one person. These alert triggers can be setup using any threshold on any metric in any report.
9. How can you achieve unmatched performance and stability with MicroStrategy Distribution Services?
Built on and consolidated with the industrial strength MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, MicroStrategy Distribution Services is integrated with tried and tested features that provide enterprise-class performance and stability, such as:
- 32-bit and 64-bit Multi-platform support (Windows, UNIX, Linux, AIX);
- Clustering, job load balancing and execution control, 24/7/365 fail-over, object caching, Intelligent Cubes, database optimization, multi-source data access, web-based user and contact administration; and
- Complete object re-use from reports and dashboards through to transmitters, devices, users and events.
10. How can the IT professional easily monitor and administer subscriptions?
Subscription management and execution monitoring is integrated into the Desktop administration interface. Administrators and IT professionals can monitor, edit and control every subscription and it’s supporting objects. Control via the Desktop administration interface ranges from:
- Tracking the live execution of subscription reports,
- Monitoring which users are assigned to which subscriptions,
- Creating and editing address and contact information, to
- Tracking subscriptions dependant on any specific schedule or report (or vice versa).
11. Does MicroStrategy Distribution Services run in 32-bit and 64-bit modes?
Yes. MicroStrategy Distribution Services is fully integrated within the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, thereby inheriting all of its administrative and operational efficiencies, as well as inheriting the Intelligence Server’s ability to run in true 64-bit mode on a range of operating systems including: Microsoft’s Windows 64, IBM’s AIX, HP’s HP-UX, Sun’s Solaris, and Linux from Red Hat and SUSE.
12. Can users change delivery settings, change subscription personalizations, or unsubscribe?
Yes, users can manage their own subscriptions by changing delivery address information, configuring subscription expiration dates, changing data personalizations, or switching on and off their own information delivery subscriptions.
13. Can users be automatically sent information without their input?
Yes. Team leads, managers, or administrators can set up subscriptions to be pushed automatically to users without any user action being required. The subscription creator can configure whether users have privileges to edit or unsubscribe each subscription and set these privileges differently for each subscription. Everyone receives and controls the information in accordance with their job responsibilities or manager requests.
14. How is MicroStrategy Distribution Services built to handle multiple languages and global information delivery?
MicroStrategy Distribution Services is fully integrated with multi-language data sources and multi-language BI application objects. Users receive personalized reports, dashboards, and notification alerts in their local language. Languages supported out of the box include: English (US), English (UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese (PRC), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, and Dutch.
15. What additional tools are available to help manage and monitor subscriptions, users, and MicroStrategy Distribution Services objects?
MicroStrategy Distribution Services is fully integrated with MicroStrategy administration tools: MicroStrategy Command Manager, MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager, and MicroStrategy Object Manager.
Subscription management and address administration and is made simple when using the powerful range of MicroStrategy administration tools:
MicroStrategy Command Manager: create and trigger events, subscriptions and their supporting objects using this powerful script based tool
MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager: collect and analyze statistics on subscription usage and delivery success using this out-of-the-box fully functioning BI application
MicroStrategy Object Manager: duplicate projects and migrate subscription objects from development into production using this intuitive drag-and-drop life-cycle management product
16. How does MicroStrategy Distribution Services relate to MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server?
In MicroStrategy 7.x and 8.x, BI Performance Monitoring and Report Delivery were exclusively managed by MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server. MicroStrategy Distribution Services, new in MicroStrategy 9, was borne out of our customers' demands for improvements to our existing report delivery and business monitoring functionality.
MicroStrategy Distribution Services delivers a significantly improved architecture compared to MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server through the provision of multi-platform support, shared design and administration GUI, a single shared metadata, shared monitoring and management applications, enhanced scalability and stability, and significantly improved user self-service.
MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server 9 supports legacy systems only, and continues to be fully supported for existing customers.
MicroStrategy will continue to invest heavily in MicroStrategy Distribution Services to provide high-value, low-cost, cutting-edge report delivery and business monitoring capabilities, and pass on these features to help guarantee our customers’ success.