Business Objects Upgrades With a Focus on SMBs - Page 2

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On screen dials and gauges

The Edge product line includes a visual analytics tool, Xcelsius 2008. This is a drag and drop environment that lets users turn data from applications into Adobe Flash applications they can view within their portal. Business Objects said Xcelsius 2008 doesn't require any programming skills and includes onscreen dials, gauges and sliders that users can manipulate to get different views of their data.

"Most people don't know how to create a cost tab to compare one number to another, or how to slice and dice data, but they do know how to push a button," Thomas said. Currently, Xcelsius uses Flash 8 as well as Adobe's Acrobat 8, so users can save documents viewed as PDFs or Word documents.

Business Objects is working on integrating Acrobat 9 into Xcelsius "because Acrobat 8 doesn't handle Flash as well as Acrobat 9," Thomas said.