Intelligencia Desktop Client

DISCLAIMER: since I licensed my SSRS custom data extension for SSAS to iT-Workplace, and since this technology is used in Intelligencia Desktop Client, I benefit financially from sales of this tool!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re no doubt aware that about a year ago I came up with an idea for a custom data extension for SSRS that makes it much easier to work with SSAS data sources, which subsequently became part of the Intelligencia Query product (which I blogged about here and has since gone through several releases). iT-Workplace, the company that sells Intelligencia Query, also produces a .NET MDX query-generator component suite called Intelligencia OLAP Controls (used in Intelligencia Query) which is aimed at third parties who want to add MDX query capabilities to their own apps, and midway last year I suggested to Andrew Wiles of iT-Workplace that he wrap these components in an exe and create his own standalone desktop client tool – and this became Intelligencia Desktop Client (IDC hereon), which I thought I’d review here in my continuing series on SSAS client tools.

IDC is distinctive because it deliberately doesn’t compete with most other Analysis Services ad hoc query tools – it’s aimed very much at the planning and budgeting market. At present the only version available is the Standard Edition which gives you query building and reporting functionality; at first impressions it does very much what other advanced ad hoc query tools like Proclarity do, but it has a lot of functionality important to financial users such as the ability to construct complex asymmetric sets on axes that many such tools lack. In fact it’s as much about creating forms for budget data entry via writeback as it is for querying and reporting; the closest comparison to make is with the PerformancePoint Excel addin although for it’s people who have built their own financial applications from scratch in Analysis Services rather than used PerformancePoint. The Enterprise Edition, which is still a CTP, will I believe offer yet more data entry and modelling functionality – I think Andrew wants to move towards incorporating cube building capabilities too.

Some features to note:

• Creating query-based calculations is very easy, and it has an innovative spreadsheet-formula-like approach to doing so that financial users will feel very at home with:
  
  Unfortunately you can’t copy a calculation from a single cell to a whole range, yet, but I’ve asked for that for a future release…
• It has a lot options for formatting the resulting table for printing or inclusion in a document:
  
  This ties in with its more mature sister product Intelligencia for Office 2007 which takes the form of Word and Excel addins, and is aimed at producing print-quality documents which incorporate live links to OLAP data.
• This formatting functionality is also useful because IDC can publish queries to Reporting Services:
  
  Depending on what your requirements are this could be a very easy way of generating SSRS reports based on SSAS data. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it makes IDC a proper SSRS report design tool since it doesn’t support the creation of any of the more advanced SSRS features; in fact IDC doesn’t have any charting capabilities (although I know this might be in the pipeline) so you can’t create reports with charts.
• It has an ‘MDX Mode’ where you can turn off the navigation pane and enter whatever MDX you want, with the query results being displayed in the grid; very useful for those times when you have to write the MDX for a query yourself. It even has Intellisense!