Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spy reader who sent in material regarding creating dashboard reports in the Lotus Notes client. My quick research leads me to agree with your opinion that the “buy” option is better than the “build” option. Let’s share with the other readers what you found for creating dashboards against a Notes database.

Intelliprint Dashboard Reporting is a native solution for Lotus Notes and Domino that provides reporting and dashboards within the workflow of Notes applications.

Let’s take a look at a couple of Intelliprint dashboard screenshots. We start off inside Lotus Notes by selecting a dashboard report:

Click on the more link to view the rest of the lotus notes dashboard screenshots.

Here is the Lotus Notes dashboard report itself. It is an Annual Sales Dashboard. Note that a separate tab has opened up.

The tool allows the business user to create dashboard reports for themselves. Here is a look at the dashboard widget layout configuration page:

The question posed by the Dashboard Spy reader revolved around the “buy versus build” issue and the dashboard project team determined that in this particular case, there was no way that a custom application approach was feasible (he works at a financial firm in crisis whose main LotusScript guru just resigned!). Hence the decision to look at the Synaptris Intelliprint dashboard product.

We had started looking at what it would take to custom build similar dashboard functionality. I thought that the product looked like it was using flash graphs from FusionCharts. I’ll do some research to verify this and report what I find.

Tags: Lotus Notes Dashboards, Intelliprint Dashboard Reports, FusionCharts Flash Charts

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