Panorama Taps Google Apps For Collaboration In Reporting

Panorama Software on Tuesday expanded its use of Google Apps by enabling customers to leverage the online office productivity suite to share and collaborate on reports.

By incorporating Google Apps within NovaView reports, Panorama says it is making the BI tool friendlier to non-technical people within an organization. Panorama has integrated Google Apps into other elements of its software, including its Web-based online analytical processing platform introduced in June. Panorama started in the summer incorporating Google Apps in its NovaView products.

Panorama, one of the fastest growing companies in the BI market, focuses on creating front-end applications that run on the BI layer of other major vendors, such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Oracle.

In its latest effort, Panaorma is using Google Apps' spreadsheets within NovaView SharedViews to make it possible for customers and partners to share reports by simply clicking on a button. NovaView then rebuilds the report and pushes it to Google, which makes it available through Google Apps.

Because NovaView reports are tied to Panorama's Web-based OLAP engine, user also can create dashboards and display them in iGoogle, which is the Web portal's customizable homepage.

"NovaView’s new SharedViews capability is especially valuable for collaborating among information workers inside the firewall, or with external partners or vendors who would not otherwise be able to collaborate effectively on important data," Oudi Antebi, VP of marketing and strategy for Panorama, said in a statement. "It gives enterprises the ability to have one spreadsheet and multiple users, all working on a single yet interactive spreadsheet-based report."

Google Apps integration is possible because Google makes the application programming interfaces to the online software available to third-party developers. The latest integration from Panorama is available through a service pack for NovaView version 5.5, which was introduced in July.

Google Apps are the search engine's software-as-a-service answer to Microsoft Office. The online suite includes Web mail, calendaring, word processing, spreadsheets and wiki-building services.