Saxifrage Systems

Beta test Saxbi — win an iPad!

jason — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:48:47 +0000

Hi all! Spring is here and the next release of Saxbi is just around the corner. We are looking for more beta testers to help test out some of the shiny new functionality available in Saxbi. Simply contact us If you’re interested in helping test out the easiest program for letting your users access fresh data from Hyperion on their iPads. Saxifrage Systems will assist with deployment, and all beta testers will be entered in to a drawing to win a new iPad!

Saxbi 1.2.0 now available in the App Store!

jason — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:43:44 +0000

I have received official confirmation that the latest update to Saxbi is approved and ready in the App Store! Saxbi 1.2.0 included an absolute laundry list of updates including some of the following:

Enhanced appearance on all screens
Portrait/landscape support on every screen
New multi-page report view control
Enhanced Selector Configuration screen with new layout
and more!

Also, Saxbi 1.2.0 laid the foundation for many exciting new features coming in 1.5.0 which will be released as soon as humanly possible. Stay tuned and please contact me if you need any help upgrading your Saxbi Server!

Saxbi Custom Corporate Edition now available

jason — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:47:26 +0000

I am happen to announce the availability of a new program from Saxifrage Systems LLC: the Custom Corporate Edition of Saxbi. Companies that would like to leverage Saxbi’s robust and extensible architecture with their own branding and functionality can now work with us to build a custom edition of Saxbi for deployment only in their environment. This is a great way to provide in-house reporting capabilities that leverage Saxbi’s functionality but for those organizations that want something a little more custom. Please check it out today and contact us to start building your own custom reporting solution!

Giant Saxbi Update

jason — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:11:20 +0000

Greetings all! Things have been crazy over here Seattle and the mad scientists are cooking up some awesome stuff in the laboratory. There are absolutely tons of updates to Saxbi and Saxbi Server. Saxbi App has been bumped to version 1.2.0 and now includes the following notable changes:

View List love. Lots of polish for the View List screen: views are sorted alphabetically, view labels don’t truncate prematurely, and you can now refresh all views without having to log out and in.
Selector Configuration screen. The selector configuration screeen has seen an almost total revamp to now include the name of the selector on the side and the contents in the main area. This now provides a strong visual cue as to how many selectors there are and if they need to be configured. The previous layout only showed two selectors at a time and if there were more it could sort of “sneak” past you.
Progress/Busy indicators. Every request to the server now causes a progress/busy dialog to show, indicating that it is waiting for a response from the server. Most screens will grey out the selected item so you can’t touch it again and put in another request to build. This should be enhanced in the next version so that builds can be performed completely in the background.
Report view screen. Reports are now switched between using a dropdown list, rather than panning left or right. This improves in many ways son the previous method: you don’t have to scroll through each page to get to one somewhere in the book, you can see the title of the page in the page selection menu, and from a technical standpoint, this opens up some doors to optimize/cutdown on the amount of memory in use, if need be.
Report zooming. Now zoom in and out of your report sheets by using the pinch gesture!
Report view/general UI polish. Every screen in Saxbi has seen some love to make the UI most consistent and polished. For example, instead of grid reports just being a plain grid on a page, they show up on a virtual piece of paper that has a nice drop shadow and is placed on the report background. These subtle UI tweaks culminate in a much more fluid and enjoyable app experience.
Landscape orientation. Landscape orientation is supported for absolutely every screen in Saxbi now, so you can turn your iPad any way you want on any screen!

And, perhaps more notable on the Saxbi Server side of the fence:

Artifact Validation. One of the indispensable features when administering a Hyperion server is the ability to verify and validate some object, typically an outline, calc script, or load rule. It is incredibly useful to be able to have the system do a sanity check on your code or configuration in order to make sure things are looking good from both a syntactic, but possibly more importantly, a semantic point of view. Saxbi is now no different. The Saxbi REST API and server management tool now support artifact validations. An artifact validation will run a series of checks on the artifact and possibly other artifacts on the server in order to determine if there are any issues it can see. This is a great feature that should be incredibly useful.
Custom Report Titles. You can now give a report any title you want and can use the choices from the selectors to fill in values for the title. Reports without the custom formatter will default to their existing behavior.
Essbase subtitution variables. Use your own substitution variables to construct a report and make administration even easier!
Install as Windows service. The Saxbi Server deployment can now be installed as a Windows service to make deployment even easier.
Saxbi server tool updates. Tons of updates to the Saxbi adminstration tool for making it easier to connect, upload, and manage data.

As you can see, this is a complete boat load full of changes. The Saxbi app has been bumped to version 1.2.0 from 1.0.0, and Saxbi Server contains all of these changes in the bump from 1.0.4 to 1.0.5. Look for the Saxbi App to show up in the App store in the coming days!

Stay tuned for more updates, as there are tons of exciting things in the pipe!

Partnership with AdvancedEPM Consulting

jason — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:10:58 +0000

Saxifrage Systems is proud to announce a partnership with AdvancedEPM Consulting, an Oracle Platinum Partner. AdvancedEPM is our preferred partner for delivering solutions with Saxbi. Partnering with AdvancedEPM is a natural fit given AdvancedEPM’s depth of talent and passion for providing high-quality EPM solutions.

Customers wishing to deploy Saxbi in their environment now have one of the leading EPM companies to help them out, while partnering with Saxifrage Systems will allow AdvancedEPM to extend iPad access to customer EPM systems as part of deployments, migrations, and upgrades.

Saxbi Server 1.0.4 available to beta testers

jason — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:12:39 +0000

To all of my esteemed testers, a new version of Saxbi Server is available. Please fire up the download location and install it in your environment and start pounding on it! New features:

Resolved a connection issue with Essbase 9.3.3 servers
Adds new Hierarchy Selector (will be available in next release of Saxbi on the App Store — coming early February)
Updated deployment documentation
Now comes as a runnable jar file — just type one command and have Saxbi server running!

To keep your existing artifact repository, just copy your existing database on top of the one that the new package comes with and you should be good to go. As always, please let me know right about about any issues. Thank you all again for your time and effort.

Hierarchy selector almost ready to go!

jason — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 06:34:26 +0000

I launched Saxbi with just one selector type: the Defined List selector. The Defined List selector is just a simple selector that allows the user to choose one or multiple choices from a particular list. This works great for many situations, but not all.

That being said, I also designed designed the entire selector system to be modular, knowing that there would be other selector types coming down the pipe (in fact, I have some designs on the drawing board that will knock your socks off). Well, one of the best things about Essbase is its hierarchal nature, it is quite simply more intuitive to see the hierarchy of the available selections. So right after 1.0.0 shipped, I put the Hierarchy Selector on the short-term roadmap of features for 1.1.0. Well, after a couple of crazy days, the first version of the Hierarchy Selector is just about ready to go. It needs a bit of polish yet but will soon be a great addition to the selector family! Here’s a little preview of how things are shaping up so far:

Saxbi selector configuration with defined list and hierarchy

Saxbi 1.0.0 published to the App Store!

jason — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:44:54 +0000

We’re live! It is with great pleasure that I am able to say that Saxbi 1.0.0 has been released and approved in the App Store. It looks like it is still making its way down the search servers and other access methods, but it’s findable in iTunes and should be findable soon on devices themselves. Check out the Saxbi iTunes page!

Saxbi 1.0.0 resubmitted, and thank you to the beta testers

jason — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:31:02 +0000

Just a slight hiccup in the app approval process. I needed to give Apple a Saxbi Server to login to and be able to test with. So I am happy to say that without too much fuss I put Saxbi up on one of our Amazon EC2 instances, configured it to point to one of our Essbase servers, and now Saxbi is live in the cloud!

I have resubmitted the app with new metadata and am hopeful that it will be approved soon enough. I am even more excited to reveal the vast enhancements to the grid control that will be coming in the next point release of Saxbi (currently 1.0.5)… so hurry up Apple and let’s get Saxbi to the masses!

Saxbi 1.0.0 submitted to the App Store!

jason — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:36:10 +0000

I am extremely proud to be able to tell you that the official Saxbi App has been submitted to the app store and now awaits Apple’s approval. The app itself is completely free. All you need is your very own Saxbi Server and you and your colleagues will be viewing live and fresh Hyperion Essbase data on the iPad in no time!