What's New in Spotfire® 7.8

TIBCO Spotfire® 7.8

Spotfire 7.8 extends the reach of the Spotfire Recommendation engine into the data space, making it easier than ever to add more rows of data to your Analysis. For Administrators, Spotfire 7.8 adds support for authentication through OpenID Connect (OIDC). And for IronPython and C# developers, there are new APIs that enable you to create more easy to use and powerful analytic applications using Spotfire.

Recommendations for Add rows

In Spotfire Business Author the user now can get a Recommendation to Add the data as rows to an existing data table when adding new data, if the Spotfire Recommendation engine determines that this is suitable. Further, Spotfire can automatically match the columns from the original and the data sets. See how this works in this Video and for more details see this article.

Data Access

Improvements to the SQL server connector

The Spotfire SQL Server Data connector now has added support for SQL server 2016, Azure SQL and Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Configure the maximum amount of in-database rows in the table visualization

In earlier versions of Spotfire, when you kept the data in-database as opposed to loading it into the Spotfire in-memory engine, Table visualizations were limited to showing at most 10000 rows. This has now been changed so that an Administrator can configure the maximum number of rows to display in a Table visualization when running against in-DB data.

The setting which is called TableVisualizationExternalRowLimit is reached through the Administation Manager.

Location Analytics

WMS 1.3.0 Support

Spotfire map charts now support version 1.3.0 of the WMS standard.

For Developers - new APIs

KPI Chart API

The KPI chart API allows authors and developers to automatically configure KPI Charts from IronPython scripts or custom tools. This enables creating more user friendly and powerful visual analytics applications for end users. See this article for further details and examples.

LayoutDefinition API

IronPython and C# Developers can now define the Layout of visuals on a page in more detail. The new API allows specifying vertical and horizontal proportions to layout the visuals on a page. This means you can now acheive similar layouts using the API as you can when manually arranging visuals on a page. See this article for further details and examples.

Administration Improvements - Federated Authentication: OpenID Connect (OIDC)

Spotfire Server now supports the use of OpenID Connect. OpenID Connect is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol. Using OpenID Connect allows a customer to set it up so that their users can login with an account they already have. For example, a user can log into Spotfire with Google, Yahoo, or Salesforce. This eliminates the need for administrators to provide their own login systems (such as LDAP or AD).

This enables administrators to reduce the number of usernames and passwords their users need to remember

To setup OpenID Connect with Spotfire Server, there are two prerequisites:

You have to configure a public address URL within Spotfire Server.

You have to register a client at the provider with a return endpoint URL, and receive a client ID and a client secret from the provider.

New Solutions and Extensions

Spotfire Templates, Data Functions, Accelerators, Extensions and Custom Datasources are available for a wide range of industry vertical and horizontal use cases.  Most are provided as free downloads.  The most popular, recent offerings are shown below.  For a complete list, view all analytics components on the TIBCO Exchange.

Alerting

The Spotfire Plug-in for Alerting allows you to configure alerts directly from any Spotfire analysis file and can be used to alert when thresholds or rules on any chart are violated.  It is an extension for TIBCO Spotfire that integrates with Automation Services via an alerting task that can generate e-mail, text or pop-up alerts.

Live Datamart Custom Data Source

This Custom Datasource is a TIBCO Spotfire® Extension that enables users to build interactive Spotfire visualizations using data stored in TIBCO® Live Datamart.

Customer Analytics and Marketing

Customer Analytics template series is used to analyze customers purchase behavior.  It includes Spotfire analysis templates for segmentation, propensity and affinity.

A/B Testing data functions provide analysis for a number of marketing use cases where the goal is to compare the effect of different ?treatments? on a response, such as click-through rates, orders or sales dollars. These treatments can be different web pages, different email designs, copy, or promotions.

Machine Learning

The Gradient Boosting Machine analysis template and data function are used to create a GBM machine learning model to understand the effects of predictor variables on a single response.  Examples of business problems that can be addressed include understanding causes of financial fraud, product quality problems, equipment failures, customer behavior, fuel efficiency, missing luggage and many others. 

Clustering with Variable Importance Data Function clusters objects together based on similarities between the objects and ranks the input variables according to their influence on cluster formation.  

Fraud

The Financial Crime Buster Analysis Template guides the user through the tasks of adhoc data discovery, supervised model creation and unsupervised model creation to build a strategy for combating financial crime.

Geoanalytics and Energy

The Contour Plot Data Function generates a contour plot as a feature layer on any map chart

The Decline Curve Analysis Data Function calculates a Hyperbolic Decline Curve Analysis using production oil and gas data.