Apliqo UX is a user experience platform designed to enhance the usability and functionality of IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) that provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface for business planning, reporting, and analysis.

In this presentation you will learn about:

1. The integration of data from ODBC connections
2. A TM1 add-on to manipulate and analyse data
3. Documentation and user guides have moved to Confluence

And other enhancements for developers and administrators!

(disclaimer: this transcript has been automatically transcribed so it may contain errors)

Our next major release is upcoming in October that would be officially released by the end of the month. And it includes our first step to integrate data from other sources, not just TM1. So the first one would be integrating data from ODBC connections and go here. So as I said, this would be integrating ODBC connection into Apliqo UX. And as you can see here, in my first example I just have a simple table, it looks like a simple grid but if I’m now going to go into the edit mode and then click on the cube settings, we would see that we actually have a select an SQL select statement here.

And if I click on the refresh I would actually get the result of this table. And the way to achieve this we now in a separate config file you can add any ODBC connection that is installed or set up on the same server where Apliqo UX is installed. And once you kind of edit it to the settings service you can specify any select statement, any valid SQL statement and I can now edit the query.

And if I just want the employee id and region I can edit the query, click on the refresh and I would get just this result and I can obviously change. In this example I kind of set up two different databases. One which I named SAP, the other one is named Oracle. And if I simply switch to the other database I can see that I have a pre populated SQL statement with the default table that is defined to that ODBC connection.

And if I actually click on the refresh now I will get the result from the top 100 records from the departments table in the Oracle database which I have set up. And obviously we’re now going to close the screen. I would see the new table coming up and if I just gonna discard the changes I would see the original table back in the result. Moving on to the second example.

So a few more tricky stuff you can do with the SQL, with SQL connection is you can use if I’m just gonna quickly, quickly open the cube here and look at the statement. At this time we added in the statement the worst statement and we can leverage the setting service values with the placeholders both on the, in this example I’m just going to click on the refresh. I hope that I noticed before that there was some network issues locally here.

Yeah, I’ve just disabled your webcam Tomer just because you seem to be struggling with bandwidth from the bunker. So everything’s okay. I can still see your screen. Okay great, thank you. So as you can see here, we’re filtering the country and we’re also filtering the start here. And if I now actually got to close the edit mode and I can change the philtre value to Spain. As you can see the table is being updated also to Italy.

If I switch back to Mexico and for instance change the start after 2020, and I would just see the records that for employees that are at the start here with that relevant year, another thing you can do, if I’m just going to switch back to 2018, you can also update the records or the SQL database. So if I now gonna put here very big numbers and we would, this is actually now has been updated the SQL database.

So if I for instance go back to the original screen, we would see here that this employee already has the salary that I just inputted it. And maybe so, yeah, you can usually update the data as well. And last but not least, you can also use charts that would render the data. So here in this example, if I just, in the select statement, I just selected the employee name and the salary.

And if I just can close that, we would see that in a simple column line chart, we see the employees with those salaries. So as you can see, this is a pretty good state of what we have with an ODPC connection. There’s obviously going to be more improvements to it and it’s still kind of in a early stage, but this is a direction that we’re definitely going to work on and we can add more sources in the future.

All right, moving on. So the next example that I wanted to share and also would be obviously part of the next release is the ability to export our annual reports to a full active form. So as you probably, as you might be aware on the May release, we already exposed the export to a slide that we just get you a simple slice with DBRWs. Now in this release we also included export as a full Active Form.

Just to actually emphasise how this works. We have this nice tool here that is part of our demo environment called storylane that you can actually use to leverage documentations on applications and training, et cetera, et cetera. So in this example you can see how work once exported form you can. Then you can use M11 add on perspective or, or slice in this specific example, which is the Cubewise tool Excel add on.

And once you click on the button to rebuild the sheet, you can full active form with the ability to expand and collapse the dimensions on the rows and also to change the philtre values of the dimensions. And then the report would be fully refreshed based on those reports, the different functionality of the formatting and to add more columns, et cetera, et cetera. So this is like the first time where you can directly from Excel, from Apliqo UX, have a full report that you can then publish and user can.

Obviously that would support write back, et cetera, et cetera. So you have quite neat functionality. Maybe another thing to mention is that something that we’ve been working on in the last few months is to move our entire documentation and kind of user guidance into confluence directly. We worked on screen steps and now we introduce confluence. So all the release notes are here, including the update process, bug fixes, technical requirements, et cetera, et cetera.

But not just that, all the training materials has been rebuilt from you here, like the adds on table material, the power user for fundamentals and advanced. And we also leverage this tool that we call storylane with those nice recordings of the screen. So it’s really easy to follow and complete the trainings. And we have big plans to re leverage this confluence site and restructure all our documentation and to have much more content here in the near future.

So stay tuned. All right, moving on. So the next example I want to, I’m going to go back to the homepage. So the next thing that we’re going to be adding is the improvements for the team one grill functionality. So if I’m now just going to open screen and if this has team unreal defined on the engine historically, you just get a snapshot of the result without any flexibility to change the philtres or to drill to do expand, collapse, etc, etcetera.

So now this is leveraging the cube viewer and you have the full flexibility of doing the full analysis. So here on the ear dimension I can find a select all the years, click on apply. Then obviously if I would select the change the year, I would see the different data for the different years, and I can obviously also drag the ear dimension here to the bottom and get the full flex flexibility.

So that’s something that a lot of our customers asked for and now is available. Okay, moving on. The next big thing that we added, there’s a lot of improvements around for report developers and administrators. So we know that the wizard component is a component that is widely used. And in a lot of times you might have ten or twelve steps. Each one of them might have three or four different subsets or more, and you might even have multiple people editing the screens at the same time.

And historically you can only save restart changes for the entire wizard without actually knowing all the steps that you would be modifying in this change. So we now restructure this a little bit. And first of all, we now have a global button to save the changes. And as you can see here, when I click on the button, I get a small menu where I can see all the steps and the substeps that currently has pending changes.

So in this example I have three steps and in step two, I have two steps and I have pending changes in the first substep and the first step of the second step. Right. And now I can individually decide to save the changes on this sub step. And if I do that, I can see that I saved my changes and I only now basically save the changes in the workbook that I’m kind of working on.

And if I’m now going to open this pop up again, I see that I only have panic changes on now step this sub, step three of the second step. And just to show maybe how this works, I can now go in here into the second step and for instance go into two b and make a small modification here. It doesn’t really matter, just apply the changes here and open again the screen.

Now I would see that also pending sub step, second b and I can decide to publish all the changes on all the step or each one of the substep. And I still have the possibility like before to save all changes or discard all the changes, right. So especially when you’re working on with multiple users, and again, you kind of potentially did your changes and didn’t save them and went back after a few days, that would give you directly first where there are any changes.

And secondly, the ability to only save or discard just a few of them. Another thing that we added or improved is in the cube settings. So if I now go to launch the cube settings and I’m just going to click here on the grid one to get the options of the widgets, we added first of all the title and the info. So now I can simply directly from here change this to grid five test and that would update automatically the title.

And obviously I can add here the info and populate the info value that I was missing before. And another thing that you could do before is also change the position. So I can for instance change now the position here to five. And if I close that and basically go here, and I would see that the grid five table is now on the last position, right. Another thing that we proved is if we now gonna click here on the product dimension and look at the MDX window.

So first of all, we made the MDX box slightly bigger so it has more visibility when you have long mdxs. But then in addition you now have the option to launch this on a full screen or relatively bigger screen with some colour coding. And obviously here I can edit the MDX. So just to make it slightly nicer, if I want to actually replace here the value and put something here on the settings service I can click on control space that will give me a the all the setting service values which are available, I can simply click this, click on save and that would update the MDX.

So yeah, hopefully all of those changes would be appreciated and would make your life easier while creating pages. Okay, the next was the kind of the main highlight from the October release. I also want to share a few updates that we’ve added in the May release this year that you might have not seen yet. So something that has also been missing. Also like pretty much from day one in the UX, we had the ability to merge widgets horizontally one next to each other and to create those multiple slices glued one next to each other.

And now we also have the ability to merge them vertically. So in this specific case I have two widgets. One the region dimension and then have the month dimension here, sharing the month dimension on the columns with the second widget here that has the version dimension and then have also the months on the column. So obviously if I now going to change the column widths, the entire table will be aligned and you can do all the other functionality.

So powerful combination and another quite big feature that we added that really allows you to build application in a different way. Also from kind of an admin perspective can save a lot of time and chaos and even designing a team on model. And this is where we introduced the virtual dimensions. And what do I mean by that? I’m just going to go here to edit mode again and click on settings and now I can go and click on the add dimension and I’m just going to select for instance the region dimension.

So historically if I already had the region dimension set as part of the global philtres, I would be able to edit once and use it once. And if I want to kind of use it more than once, I would have to create alternative hierarchies where here in this specific example I can give it a unique key, unique key and click on the global philtres. And just like that I created a new dropdown in my global philtre that is called region unique and I can obviously give it a different name, but in fact is based on the region dimension elements.

So I can now just select any list of elements and obviously select any one of the basically aliases that exist. And if I click now and apply and close the pop up, I would get here a new philtre values that I can obviously now use with this setting service values in my reports and then basically create those cool options where in this specific example, like cascading selections where I select the main region and that would give me on the second selection the children of those elements.

Right. And obviously the benefit of that is from a TM1 developer, you don’t have to be creating extra dummy dimensions and you don’t have the challenges of that extra dimension being inserted in another intersect into the MDX, which might make data entry impossible for your users, for example. So it’s lots of benefits for building apps. Yeah, exactly. And like even to emphasise on that, another option that we added is you don’t even like those list of elements, doesn’t even have to exist in TM1.

So you can even create those custom, full custom lists. And in this example, we created this custom list which called, we created three elements, clothing, bikes and accessories. And with nice kind of HTML tags, we gave them icons. And as you can see here, like three elements or this dimension doesn’t even exist in taide at all. You can still use this to drive the selections of the other widgets.

Right? So yeah, quite powerful combination. Okay. And last, and last least is the status bar. So something that a lot of people use from Excel. Now when you basically multi select any one of more than two cells, you automatically get the average sum, the maximum, the mean and the count. And if you do it on views, you would also get it directly here on the title of the application.

So also quite useful. A lot of time you had to do it like somewhere in a formula and export it to exactly that. So that’s something you can also do now. Okay. That was the, yeah, kind of the main features I wanted to share with you today. Are there any questions? Okay, if we just sort of understand our audience, I just sort of see if anybody, if we’re talking to people who know the product or not, we’ll just give people a few seconds to answer.

Okay. I think we can assume that everybody in the session is a customer then. All right, and I’ll jump back to the other poll that we had open. And given that we know people are customers, the first feature that we showed on SQL sort of integration or ODBC data sources directly in your application without having to stage it first or do a TM1 drill through. If people can sort of already think about what that means, is it something you already want or is it something that now you’ve seen it, you want or you’re indifferent?

Okay, well, that’s great. At least we know we’re working on the right things. Tomer. Yes. In terms of time, we’re still good. Still got six minutes to go, so if anybody wants to ask any questions, I’ve got one preloaded question. We’ve talked about the October release. Tomer, when is the October release going to be released? Yeah. So we’re planning to have a better release in this week. And if there’s not going to be anything critical that we find, then by the end of next week the official release will be out.

Okay, great. Okay. I’m not seeing any questions coming through, so just give it another minute. If anybody has one, feel free to ask. Yeah, I apologise if the audio is not clear enough. And, yeah, hopefully you enjoyed the session. And yeah, if you have any questions to us, feel free. And you know how to reach us, I hope. Okay. All right. I don’t think we’re going to get any more questions, so thank you very much, everybody, for attending.

Don’t forget to go to the merchandise and get your great new, like, available t shirts that, that or whatever, like, tickles your fancy about horizon. And don’t forget that you can that any profits that go to that go directly to the Manny Perez scholarship fund as well. Okay, we do have a question. Oh, could we have more examples of full MDX, I guess in the demo application that would sort of mean.

So, yeah, I think, yes, we can manage that. Let’s do that. Okay. And everyone, don’t forget to include your feedback. I’ll just put that through now at the end. So don’t forget the feedback for the session. And thank you very much for attending. And I hope you have a great rest of Horizon. And do good TM1. See you later. See you later.