retain source information while embedding business intelligence content
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Someone that I follow on Twitter posted an interesting link yesterday. The link itself is an article on http://www.wired.com and discusses a new series of MacBooks with Intel chips, but the interesting part is what happens when you copy part of the article text and paste it into another application. You can find the article here. I copied the first paragraph from the article and pasted it directly into the editor for this blog. The results are shown below.
Along with its much anticipated tablet (still in the rumor stage), Apple could announce an upgrade for its MacBook Pro notebooks featuring new Intel chips in a late January event.
It’s nice because you can grab a relevant bit of text from the article, paste it into an email, and the receiver of your email would be able to head over to the source to read the entire article. The technology used underneath is called Tynt Insight. Not only does it allow for the source of the copied text to be known to the user, but it also allows for tracking the number of times that each bit of text on your pages is being copied. This presents an entirely new way to determine which of your content is the most engaging.
This would be extremely useful within the context of business intelligence. For example, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence & Crystal Reports allows allows you to copy parts of a report (like a table of text or a line chart) and paste it into another application (like Outlook or Gmail). When this copy action happens we could use some technology like Tynt Insight to grab the full link to the report in an online portal and put that under the report part when it is pasted into an email.
Read More: http://sales.intra.efashion.com/businessobjects/enterprise115/openDocument.jsp?sType=wid&sDocName=SalesReport&iDocID=2010
This type of technology could also work well when copying a specific data point in order to retain the context in which the data point existed. For example, if a user were to copy the total sales revenue for 2004 from the report shown above and paste it into Outlook, we could bring over other data points about the report where the revenue total exists. The screenshots below show some potential examples.
Source Report: Total Revenue
Source Report: Total Revenue; Last Updated: Oct 4 2009
Source Report: Total Revenue; Data Source: eFashion EDW; Last Load: Jan 1 2010
Previous Year Revenue: 3,400,129
This presents some interesting possibilities for embedding and integrating BI applications within other applications and information portals.