With my background of using Business Intelligence projects
in large and medium size enterprise applications, I looked at how Xcelsius
integrates with corporate intranet applications.
From my perspective, the main question is: can it integrate
with SharePoint
easily? The answer I found was, no. In the future, it looks like they will
have a release that integrates with SharePoint on the drawing board, but the
Workgroup version only has a publishing option for PlumTree. See Figure 3.
Figure 3: Exporting Options
So, the current way Xcelsius could work in the enterprise
would be to set up a share on the web server, giving the user appropriate
rights to that share. Not the ideal situation in my opinion, but that looks
like the way this would be done. For SharePoint sites, you probably could
publish to a document library or something, but I would think you would want
the dashboard as a web part. So the share on the web server looks like the
best option.
For the future, it looks like Crystal is developing a
version of Xcelsius that will work with SharePoint. I did find mention of this
in a news release, but there was no link to the actual product. So it looks
like that is in development.
The users of this product, in my opinion, are going to be analysts
in financial or other departments (in the enterprise). These users are going
to want access to data using existing Excel spreadsheets or connecting through the
custom web services that connect to their corporate data stores.