Yellowfin’s Social and Collaborative Business Intelligence (BI) features provide an industry leading enterprise collaboration platform.

These features provide a mechanism for users to share and discuss their business data, leading to faster and smarter decision-making.

Collaboration should be at the core of any BI initiative. As all your organizational data is accessed via a BI tool, doesn’t it make sense for the collaborative decision-making process to occur within that same environment? With Yellowfin it can.

There are three main components to enterprise collaboration. These are:

1. Sharing knowledge and content
2. Discussing and overlaying knowledge on your business data
3. Collectively deciding the best course of action

Yellowfin is making collaboration easy.

Sharing knowledge is the goal of any collaborative endeavor. A Social BI platform must support the ability to share your data and insights in a manner that suits your needs and within a secure framework.

Yellowfin goes well beyond the basic capacity to email reports or direct links. With Yellowfin you can embed reports into blogs, wiki’s, and portals through either our web services API or through our easy to use embeddable widget – Yellowfin Connect.

Yellowfin Connect makes sharing incredibly easy. Just like embedding a YouTube video, you simply copy a small piece of HTML code from the report menu and place that into your forum, wiki or anywhere that makes sense. Instantly your report will be made publicly available.

Yellowfin does not limit your ability to share, Yellowfin connect supports it!

Good decisions are not made in isolation. They are made collaboratively via discussion and in conjunction with a range of supporting reports and data.

Yellowfin 5.1 introduces a profound shift in the way a Business Intelligence tool supports collaboration. Not only can users add comments to reports and annotate their data but they can discuss critical business topics within a fully integrated discussion forum. Within this forum users can share not only their ideas and insight but their reports and data as well.

Yellowfin provides three ways for users to discuss their data. These are:

Report level discussions - Users can participate in discussions concerning a particular report and the data within that single report.

Annotations - Annotations allow users to overlay knowledge onto a report to help explain the actual events that gave rise to a particular trend in the data.

Discussion topics - This type of collaboration allows users to drive analysis and decision-making through threaded discussions and guided analysis by sharing insight from multiple reports simultaneously.

The goal of any BI program is to improve the decision-making power of the end-user. The usefulness of BI and group discussion at the enterprise level rests entirely on the ability to reach appropriate and timely decisions. For corporate discussion forums to be successful, they must include a mechanism for deciding action (the Yellowfin decision widget), such as voting or polling, to help push conversation towards a specific, measurable and desirable course of action.

Yellowfin’s integrated discussion forum includes decision widgets that allow users to effectively collaborate on key business decisions. Not only can they incorporate data into a discussion but with decision widgets also have the mechanism to effectively ask questions and respond to those questions collectively.

At Yellowfin, we understand that to realize Return on Investment, the overriding goal of any BI project, users must be able to make meaningful business decisions. Yellowfin’s Social and Collaborative BI features enable you to Visualize, Socialize and Decide.