What's New in QlikView 8?
QlikView 8 is considerably more powerful for data analysis while being even easier to use than before. A large number of improvements have been made compared with version 7.5, some of them truly ground-breaking. We believe that there will be something for everyone to enjoy. Most of the new fea¬tures are presented more in detail below.
Product integration
Two major themes when making the speciiïcation of QlikView 8 was to strengthen QlikView’s ability to serve really large numbers of users and to handle really large numbers of documents. The key to these goals, we believe, lies with QlikView Server and QlikView Publisher. Making those components part of the default QlikView confïguration is thus a must. With a number of developments, we have tried to make them more integrated, more accessible and easier to utilize.
One product suite
With the release of QlikView 8, we want to emphasize the merging of QlikView, QlikView Server and QlikView Publisher into one integrated product suite. All components now share the same version number. A number of features have been added to make the components feel as one integrated unit.
By configuring URLs in the Locations folder of User Preferences, the QlikView administrator can have direct shortcuts to the QlikView Publisher control panel and the new html-based QlikView server control panel from the QlikView menu. The control panels will of course appear as html windows inside QlikView.
Another configurable URL in the Locations folder gives the end-user direct shortcuts to QlikView AccessPoint from the QlikView menu. The AccessPoint will of course appear as an html window inside QlikView.
Folder locations for QlikView server documents and QlikView Publisher source documents can be defined in the Locations page of User Preferences. When this is done, icons for direct access to these folders will appear in the Open and Save dialogs (requires Windows XP or later).
A page generator for the object based clients (AJAX zero-footprint, Java Objects and QlikX) has been integrated into QlikView. The wizard-driven generator will take any QlikView document and produce a corresponding html page layout for any of the client types listed above. The html page can be previewed in an html window inside QlikView. The pages produced may be used directly or edited further in any html design tool.
The following developments are mainly related QlikView Server and with the exception of graceful document refresh may belong more in the What’s new section of the QlikView Server reference manual. For reasons stated above we still chose to list them here as well.
When using QlikView as a client to QlikView Server, it is now possible to refresh your session with new data (as the server document is updated) without loosing session or selection state.
The QlikView Java clients have been completely re-written to make full use of the possibilities in Sun Java 1.5. The result is a client close to pixel-perfect in behavior compared to the IE plug-in client. New features include better font-handling, support for transparent objects, color gradients, object borders with rounded corners etc. It is our ambition that the Java clients will gradually be expanded to cover basically all functionality supported in the IE plug-in client.
The work continues to expand the functionality of the AJAX client and also to improve performance. Better perceived performance is expected mainly to an increased asynchronicity of individual sheet objects.
The new QlikView server Control Panel is fully html based. It communicates not with the registry but rather directly with QlikView Server via a new web service interface. In addition to the controls of the old exe control panel it includes monitoring of various aspects of the QlikView Server, e.g. active users, active sessions, memory usage etc. The plan is to gradually expand the control panel with more control options, allowing for e.g. pre-loading of documents, scheduled loading/unloading, user exemption etc.
A basic (trimmed down to the specific needs of QlikView Server and QlikView Publisher) http server has been added to QlikView Server. When running QlikView Server on Windows XP or later it will provide an alternative to MS IIS. It is expected that the use of the built-in http server will be expanded in QlikView versions to come.
To discuss your Business Intelligence requirements in more detail, please call us on 0845 850 1550 or email us at sales@pythagoras.co.uk.