Casting Director™

As an organization's business intelligence footprint grows, so does the need for robust information delivery. Often times, these needs (such as embedding reports directly within an email or creating dynamic schedules based on a table in your database) go answered in commerically available software.

All that has changed with Altek Solutions Casting Director.

What is Casting Director?

CastingDirector™ is an extension to Business Objects XI, designed to enhance InfoView’s built-in scheduling capabilities. It also allows administrators to more easily manage report schedules and also provides additional delivery options and formats not available in the core product.

Scheduling With Casting Director

CastingDirector™, on the other hand, can read its scheduling information from any Microsoft Excel file or Business Objects report -- Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence, or Crystal. This feature allows CastingDirector™ to access its scheduling information from any database that Business Objects can connect to.

This also allows you to leverage the Business Objects universe semantic layer to combine the scheduling data with other data sources, such as address lists. Using report parameters and prompts, scheduling data can be filtered in almost any way imaginable. Essentially, CastingDirector™ allows you to use all of the power of Business Objects to generate your report schedules.

New Distribution Formats

Using a simple and concise syntax, schedule entries can be created to save reports to disk, upload them to an FTP, send them via email, print them to any network printer, or send them to a user’s Business Objects inbox. Depending on the method of delivery and the type of report, reports can be sent in a variety of formats, including Adobe Acrobat (PDF), Microsoft Excel (XLS), CSV, XML, HTML, and more.

This provides for many combinations, such as:

• Reports sent as HTML emails to mobile devices such as a Blackberry
• PDFs uploaded via FTP to an Intranet/Extranet web server
• Paper reports automatically printed overnight

Since CastingDirector™ itself exists as a program object in the Business Objects system, it is run and scheduled using InfoView. The results of each run are contained within the system and are viewable through both InfoView and the Central Management Console.

For More Information

With CastingDirector™, you can leverage the complete power of Business Objects to provide simple, easy to manage report scheduling with much more versatility and flexibility than Business Objects offers out of the box.

For more information on CastingDirector™ or to obtain a free evaluation copy of the software, please call (877) 844-7476 or email info@alteksolutions.com.