gauges and stoplights

[jojojojo]

We are looking at purchasing a business intelligence solution and I am currently comparing scorecard/visualization tools. I notice from their web site that Microstrategy provides guages, stoplights and drill through, which is basically all we want/need right now.

Does any one know if the guages etc are customizable or "out-of-the_box" as they say it, and non customizable. What is involved in implementing this product. I can't really find any info on their website. I would like a first hand perspective anyway before I get the pitch from the sales person. Can anyone give me a heads up of things I should ask or look for.

Thanks,

 

[nlim]

the way stoplights and gauges work in MicroStrategy is kind of interesting: they do it by putting excel style "conditional formating" on the report. The way gauges work is that you can specify images to display based on the value of the metric. Say sales between 0 and 1000, you can use image1, sales between 1000 and 2000 you can use image2.

There are some images out of the box,but you can easily create your own with your creative side, and then just link them to the conditional formatting on the report.

They also have a free eval that you can order to try it out. Their "tutorial" demo has nice gauges and stoplight examples.