OneStream recently announced it’s 6.0 update on its corporate performance management platform. The new release includes several significant new features, improvements to existing ones, new APIs, and the bug fixes. Developed to improve OneStream’s design capabilities, performance, and ease of use, 6.0 will benefit end users, administrators, and developers alike.
More than anything, this version shows that the company is listening to its customers and is focused on the reporting capabilities in this release. While the two recent minor updates were primarily focused on getting data into the application (BI Blend) and calculation engine enhancements (predictive analytics), version 6.0 is clearly focused on getting data out and improving the end user experience. With enhancements to the cube views, forms, and Excel integration, this release provides even more reporting and form-based calculations, and formatting options.
One of the key improvements announced in this release is the ability of the end user to show a hidden row in an input form without changing the suppression setting. Let’s say you need to enter a budget for a department. There are 1,000 accounts to choose from and only a few of them have actual data. Your budget only needs to enter 20 accounts but not all these accounts have actual data in them. Instead of showing all 1,000 rows in the form, you turn row suppression to “True.” This will hide any row that has a zero balance. So far, so good. However, let’s say that you want to enter data to a row that is suppressed because it doesn’t have any actual data in it. With the new feature, you can unhide only the rows you want to populate, irrespective of whether they have actual data or not. Having this ability will make a big difference for planning users when entering sparse data or when they have to pick combinations of nested dimensions. This feature will also give administrators much more flexibility when building input forms for users and let end users can focus on getting the right data into the right place.
Example
The following budget data entry form is set to suppress rows that have no values. Since accounts 50230 and 50240 have no values, they do not show up on the form. However, if a user needs to enter data in one of these accounts, they can use the new feature to show suppressed members. This is done by right clicking rows that are marked (yellow triangles in the bottom right corner of the cell) and selecting “Insert Suppressed Member”:
This action opens up a dialog box that lets the user enter data into the suppressed member:
This simple, yet effective solution is just one example of how OneStream is focused on making life easier for the end users, administrators, and yes, developers too.
Moving forward, OneStream has announced that it is moving to a quarterly release schedule, with new features added more often. If there is a new major release next year, it will be interesting to see if it focuses more on end user functionality or engine development.
Want to learn more about 6.0 and how it impacts you? MorganFranklin can help clients transform their existing environments to take advantage of the new features in OneStream 6.0, such as a new business-intelligence data-blending solution to get more data.
