One of the things OBIEE doesn’t have out of the box is a user comment option (although future versions may have integration with Oracle Webcenter, which provides social computing). So what are our options if we need to leave comments about specific reports/dashboards or give users the option to add documentation to the reports? One option is to embed Google wave in an OBI dashboard for feedback and wiki type documentation.
Google wave is a new kind of collaboration tool that combines elements of email, wiki and chat. Basically everything on a wave can be edited. A varying number of users can be part of the wave or it can be public like in the example below. A wave can be embedded on any Web page. An embedded wave can be edited either on the page itself or through Google wave accounts.
Google Wave embedded in OBI Dashboard
What we’re seeing in the screenshot above is one of the OBIEE reports on the left and an embedded and public Google wave on the right. The upper part of the wave has a stub for documentation – users are encouraged to contribute to the documentation which is actually an editable piece of text (wiki). However, in this example contributors have also used the wave to leave comments and questions about the report.
The user comments appear instantly to everybody regardless of how they were entered, e.g., on the dashboard, inside the user’s Google wave account, on his/her mobile device. The highlighted text shows the changes done to the documentation compared to my original version (version control). Other users would not see the yellow highlight, but in this case the screenshot was done with my account.
OBIEE is a web environment and anything can be embedded there. The steps to embed a wave are fairly simple:
1. Open a Google wave account – for the moment you need an invitation. But many of us already have an account and simply don’t know what to do with it...
2. Create a new wave and write the body of the wave. In this case I’ve written the header and a brief description.
3. Add the following addresses to your contacts:
a) In order to make the wave public, add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts and then to the participants of the wave. It’s a kind of a special user and by adding it you are granting rights for everybody to access the wave.
b) To get the embed code, just add embeddy@appspot.com (one of many applications for Google waves in the Google application library) to your contacts and then to the participants of the wave. Embeddy will reply back with the needed snippets. After using them you can hide the snippets from the wave. The snippet contains the unique ID of the wave.
c) Additionally you might want to add the people responsible for documentation to the wave so that they can see notification in their Google wave inbox when it has changed.
The screenshot below shows the wave in my inbox. On the top you have the recipients:public@a.gwave.com (Earth symbol) giving access to everybody,embeddy@appspot.com, which gave me the embed code and the “admins” of the wave. I’ve written the stub of the documentation here in my inbox:
Google Wave contacts
The following screenshot shows the reply from Embeddy giving me the code needed for embedding the wave. After copying the code I deleted the reply since it’s not interesting for the users. Each wave has a unique ID that needs to be used in order to show the wave.
Embeddy code
4. Copy the snippets from Embeddy into an OBI narrative view like this. Just place both codes in the Narrative box one after the other:
Narrative box
5. Be sure to set the Rows to display to 1. The request itself can be any query that returns rows. For the compound layout, select only the narrative view. Alternatively you can add a narrative view to an existing report and add it to the compound layout of that report.
6. Place your report in a dashboard (wherever you want it to be available).
That’s it! Any changes made by users of this wave are instantly reflected on everyone’s screen. Additionally if you added admins to the wave they will see any changes in their Google wave inbox.
Note that even though the wave is now public, the users still need to have Google wave accounts in order to access it. If a Google wave session is open, the wave displays automatically. Otherwise it will prompt the user to log in. In addition, users will still need to log in to OBIEE – the unique ID of the wave means that it can’t be accessed from everywhere unless we want it to be.
Nice! Now what could this new tool do for us? We could create a wave – they’re free – for each report or dashboard. Users could participate in and add to the documentation of the reports. They can also give feedback to developers in UAT environment and ask questions or give explanations to other users regarding the reports, dashboards or the data they contain. The waves could be public, company-wide, team specific, etc. In the future there are likely to be interesting Google wave applications that could be used instead of waves. If you are using Google wave with your BI system, we would be interested to hear how it's going...
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