Open XML Community Solution Case Study
Solution Provider Uses Open XML to Create Scalable Business Intelligence Tools
Fast Facts
Customer: Winsight Web Site: www.winsight.fr Customer Size: 70 employees Country or Region: France Industry: Software Customer Profile Founded in 1998, Winsight, a subsidiary of Winwise.
“With Open XML, everything is both faster and easier. It took us only a few days to integrate our reporting solution with Microsoft Excel, and we are free to explore new prospects for expansion.”
Fabrice Michellonet, Research & Development Director, Winsight
Software and Services Technologies − Open XML Formats
Software developer Winsight wanted to integrate its reporting tool ReportSmith.net with Microsoft® Office Excel® spreadsheet software to satisfy customer demand, but initially considered the project to be too complex and costly. But with the availability of Open XML Formats, it was able to integrate its reporting tool in just a few weeks. What’s more, the new open architecture encourages better application scalability. Business Needs
Winsight, a subsidiary of Winwise, designs software and offers services, technology training, and consulting on projects. Specialists in implementing business intelligence (BI) decision support systems in IT systems based on Microsoft® technologies, Winsight has its own line of tools called OLAP Webhouse. A notable member of this lineup is ReportSmith.net, a decision support interface that unites both the power of analysis and flexibility in reporting in a single Web application. ReportSmith.net complements Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services, and had only a Web browser as its client—until recently. ReportSmith.net was developed using Microsoft ASP.NET coupled with cascading style sheets, so that users can apply skins to change the application’s appearance. With ReportSmith.net, user scan create sophisticated reports with just few mouse clicks, incorporating drill-down capability (a way to navigate through data from the most general to the most detailed), data filters, key performance indicators, and more. Users can also apply filters, add personalized calculations shared among reports, format graphs and tables to integrate them into a graphic chart, and even export reports in the Microsoft ASP.NET file format, in order to integrate them into their own Web applications and share them on online portals).
But even with its rich feature set, users could not export data to Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets with ReportSmith.net. “With the older versions of Microsoft Office, generating Excel documents using the binary file format was a problem in terms of development as well as deployment,” explains Fabrice Michellonet, Research & Development Director at Winsight. The old file format was difficult to understand and complex to program, and we would have had to install components of the Microsoft Office suite on our server to be able to export the data to Microsoft Excel—a deployment that would have incurred extra costs. “Before the Open XML Format, we thought the process of updating our application to support integration would be difficult and unfeasible financially. When it adopted Open XML Formats for its Office suite, Microsoft simplified our job considerably and at the same time opened up development prospects for our decision support software products.” With the release, Winsight could abandon its plans to invest in a third-party component to update ReportSmith.net; instead, it could do the work itself.
an open architecture that it still controls (as opposed to eventually being acquired by a third party). This means that all the queries addressed to the SQL Server online analytical processing (OLAP) engine in XML for Analysis (XMLA) generate a return XML flow processed by a Web service. Depending on users’ needs, this flow can be displayed on Web pages or in a worksheet by applying an XML schema that changes the file into Open XML.
Implementing this architecture provides Winsight with flexibility. “If one of our clients uses a different office suite, such as Open Office, and wants a similar export feature for its spreadsheet software, we can adapt quickly because we manage the XML flow. We just need to apply a new style sheet and we’re done!” says Michellonet.
Benefits
With Open XML, generating worksheets on a server is as easy as generating an XML document. Winsight can now address its customers’ requests by generating ReportSmith.net reports for spreadsheet applications. Fewer than 30 days were needed to accomplish the integration that had once been considered too complicated. Michellonet says, “The arrival of Open XML pushed us to address all the problems. The simplicity of the format and of XML allowed us to write our own file generator quickly, and to change it according to our needs without having to master all the possibilities offered by the format.” For Michellonet, Ecma certification is also a guarantee that there will always be a sufficient level of technical documentation and that the technology will endure. And during development, the company noted a lot of activity surrounding XML in the different online communities that work on solutions using the format. “We found a gold mine of information that we couldn’t find for the old binary format. With better information, we were able to move forward more quickly and easily,” says Michellonet.
Solution
Open XML is an open file format that has been standardized by the Ecma International industry association. Open XML offers unparalleled transparency and openness in comparison to binary file formats and is designed to be backward compatible with billions of existing documents. In addition, clients and partners can use this format to document content any way they want, regardless of the software that was used to create it. By creating its own Open XML file generator for spreadsheets, Winsight was able to design
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published August 2007