SAP and Adobe recently sponsored a Flex Your Muscles with Xcelsius SDK Contest and Win 15K! that challenged the developer community to demonstrate the most innovative use of the Xcelsius 2008 Flex-based Software Development Kit and create custom visualization components and feature extensions that solve business need. Developers were asked to submit their solutions to 5 different categories for a chance to win $15,000 and free copies of Adobe Creative Suite. A panel of Xcelsius product experts judged the proposed solutions and today, we are proud to announce the winners: SAP, BOE, or 3rd party product integrations
First prize: Xcelsius Web Intelligence Integration Suite by Antivia (view demo)
Antivia created a unique solution that introduces a new way to access data from Web Intelligence reports within Xcelsius Dashboards. It uses the Xcelsius SDK, Adobe Flex and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence SDK's to integrates the power of Web Intelligence directly into Xcelsius dashboards.
Runner-up: Wall Street Images by Centigon Solutions and Wall Street Images (view demo)
Wall Street Images provides a visual mapping of sectors, industries and companies in the competitive landscape of Wall Street. Now available for Xcelsius, Wall Street Images enables a user to navigate 125 visual maps for 11 sectors, 125 industries and 5500 companies with point and click simplicity. Coupling Wall Street Images plugin with Xignite financial data connectivity and graphical components within Xcelsius presents an innovative way for any user to navigate Wall Street with ease!
Visualization components
First prize: qtGrid by Great Lakes Consulting (view demo)
qtGrid is a Xcelsius component built using the Flex-based Xcelsius 2008 SDK. This Advanced Dimensional Visualization and Analysis component manages the successive calls to QaaWS resulting in a dynamic treegrid selector for downstream XC components while visualizing data as a microchart datagrid.
Runner-up: Inovista Micro Charting Suite by Inovista (view demo)
The Inovista Micro Charting Suite contains a full range of charts, shapes, icons and textual indicators. Additionally, there are container type components within the suite that help a designer to group related data sets and present them as data grids or as a hierarchical tree grid which allows a user to navigate through the hierarchy. The suite also contains many extensions to the existing Xcelsius property editors. Among many others; are gradient colour, behavioural effect and mouse click editors.
Feature extensions (Non-visual components)
First prize: DrillBar Component by Clearpeaks (view demo)
The component enables to drill down and go back up on a chart. Handles a hierarchical structure providing navigation between the levels. Because it is not displaying the data itself, rather enables navigation in your structure; you can use it together with the regular chart components of Xcelsius. Gives the flexibility to use it with a variety of chart types, applying themes and styles; seamlessly integrating drill functionality to Xcelsius dashboards!
Runner-up: Statistics Functions and Math Functions by Cobi Systems (view demo)
Currently Xcelsius has limited support for native Excel math functions. Cobi systems' Statistics Functions and Math Functions feature extension for Xcelsius provide native support for addtional Excel function.
Data connectors
First prize: SalesForce Data Connector by Moss Solutions (view demo)
This add-on provides users with a simple means to create Xcelsius dashboards that access the wealth of information held within their organization on Salesforce.com. it allows users to overcome this deficiency and use Xcelsius to turn their Salesforce.com reports into interactive dashboards. By working directly with Salesforce.com reports designers can leverage work already done within their organization. This provides a seamless integration with the Salesforce.com environment and does not require additional or redundant efforts to define the reporting information for the organization.
Runner-up: Inovista Document Data Retrieval by Inovista (view demo)
The Inovista Document Data Retrieval component allows an Xcelsius designer to extract textual and number data directly from InfoView documents and map that data directly into Xcelsius spreadsheet ranges.The source data may be Web Intelligence, Business Intelligence or Crystal documents. Individual reports or report sections can be selected.
Outside the box
First prize: Filtered Data Grid by Cobi System (view demo)
This add-on component displays a data grid with Excel like filter interactions.
Runner-up: Smart Select Component (view demo)
The Smart Select Component has been developed in order to be able to have a quick view on which elements match certain parameters. For example: Managers need to search for people with different skills within the company when composing a team. Parameters here are the skills, the elements or objects are the employees within his company. With the component you can simply drag and drop skills into a query list. Each time you drop a skill into the query, only the employees with the skills in your query will be visible.
There were many excellent submissions. It was very difficult for the judgingpanel to just pick five. Over the next few weeks we are going to work together with a large number of the challenge solvers on productizing their solutions and making them available for public use on Xcelsius Add-on Marketplace.
