RIA Developer's Journal on Ulitzer

Actuate Corporation has announced BIRT Performance Scorecard 9, the latest iteration of its Performance Management solution. BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 is a Rich Information Application (RIA) that fully integrates BIRT to bring the simplicity and collaboration of consumer internet applications to the Performance Management process. With Version 9 comes BIRT Scorecard Exchange, a pioneering business to business site that grants BIRT Performance Management practitioners no cost access to best practices, frameworks, prebuilt measurement criteria and community links. BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 offers customers a completely new user interface, flash-based dashboard charts and an expanding number of newly designed out-of-the-box BIRT reports.

BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 (formerly known as Actuate Performancesoft Views), includes BIRT Scorecard Exchange, a collection of Actuate libraries and customer best practices enabling users to access and share pre-built solutions to improve organizational performance. Organized by vertical markets including financial services, healthcare and government, BIRT Scorecard Exchange includes templates and measures that can be used as frameworks to pre-populate best practices and common category measures when organizations want to get up and running quickly with best in class performance management. Organizations can subsequently translate any strategy or performance measurement paradigm into tangible metrics, allowing management to make aligned and effective decisions. Also included on the site are forums for users to collaborate, share best practices and have access to thousands of proven KPIs at all levels.

In addition to extending itself to the collaborative nature of BIRT Scorecard Exchange, BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 continues to expand its integration with the BIRT iServer platform by enhancing the packaged Web Services and Information Objects for simple and dynamic access to performance management data stored in the application. The full integration with the latest version of the BIRT iServer, allows customers to take advantage of all the features and functionality available with the Actuate 10 platform.

BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 delivered as a true Rich Information Application increases usability and improves communication and corporate alignment for users. This provides organizations with the ability to measure the impact of organizational decisions on employee productivity and satisfaction while also being able to identify areas of improvement through a built in executive dashboard. Customers can measure organizational performance in a variety of strategic frameworks and an expanded complement of standard reports which will continue to grow.

In addition to the numerous upgrades included in BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 for increased usability, to jumpstart adoption and increase the collaboration on BIRT Scorecard Exchange, additional new features include the following:

• Rich new user interface and architecture using latest Web 2.0 technology
• Dynamic visualizations using Flash based charts
• New Back-end architecture using SQL Server Express as the Standard Database Repository
• Rich Text Editing in Commentary including support for hyperlinks
• Map Designer Undo/Redo feature
• Save as Image option for Views and Maps
• Auto date/time stamp for commentary
• Seamless browser control of font sizes