Embedding a Flash Video in an InfoView Corporate Dashboard

A really interesting way to capture a user's attention is to create an attractive Flash Video and embed it in a Corporate Dashboard. The graphs and charts that come out of the box with BusinessObjects Enterprise are not that exciting enough to grab the user's attention.

Embedding a Flash Video in a Corporate Dashboard is actually a 2 step process. First, you need to actually create the Flash Video. Since we are talking about visual dashboards here, ones that display metric data, good old fashioned Adobe Flash won't work. Your going to need a tool like Xcelsius to help you in that area.

Xcelsius is a visualization design tool specifically aimed at helping designers create dashboards that display metric data; charts, graphs, gauges, sliders, etc. After you have created a dashboard, it is as simple as exporting it as a Flash Video.

Step 2 is actually the interesting part. First, you will need to take your newly exported Flash Video and add it under a directory accessible by InfoView. I usually decide to place it relative to the root InfoView directory, which you can find here:

\[BO-INSTALL-DIRECTORY]\Tomcat\webapps\businessobjects\enterprise115
\desktoplaunch\InfoView\

You can either place it directly in that directory or create a new sub-directory and place it there.

On a Corporate Dashboard, create either a new tab or edit an existing one. Add a new Text Analytic to the Corporate Dashboard and specify its source to be HTML. Edit the HTML to embed the Flash Video and your done.

Keep in mind that Xcelsius is a very powerful tool, but it still runs independent of BusinessObjects Enterprise. To retrieve data from your Data Warehouse or Data Mart for a dashboard created with Xcelsius, you will need to use a couple more tricks which I will discuss in a later post.