Wyn Enterprise 5.1 is Released

The Wyn Enterprise 5.1 release is now available. Wyn 5.1 enhances Wyn’s embeddability options. This is a major release that includes enhanced analytical expressions, improved conditional formatting, a Smart Viz engine, and custom fonts. Wyn Enterprise 5.1 supports more deployment architectures such as clusters, network load balancers, geo-distributed servers, and Kubernetes scripting.

With the move to the cloud, web applications require to be on all the time. There are DR and HA deployments and options to consider while setting up any web application for cloud-based services. With the new release, Wyn Enterprise supports more deployment architectures such as clusters, network load balancers, geo-distributed servers, Kubernetes scripting, and more.

Dashboards:

Wyn 5.1 includes many data visualization enhancements, including smart visualizations, improved analytic model capabilities with analytical expressions, real-time updates for streaming data, streamlined API, and embedded designer and viewer packaging.

Read more about 5.1 dashboard enhancements here. 

Reporting:

Reporting contains UI/UX enhancements and several customer-requested features, including page skipping, report caching, custom fonts, additional granular permissions, improvements to parameter performance, and report rendering.

Read about Wyn 5.1 report enhancements here.

Enhanced Data Access for Dashboards and Reports

With new data sources, users can source the dashboard and report data from a larger variety of data sources. As BigData data sources become more popular to store large amounts of data for analysis, Wyn Enterprise added the support for popular BigData platforms like Google BigQuery and Clickhouse.

Wyn 5.1 includes the following new data sources:

• Google BigQuery
• DB2
• iSeries/AS400 Mainframes
• TimeScaleDB
• Clickhouse DB
• Maria DB
• Amazon Redshift
• Enhanced JSON dataset allows for multiple base URLs for the web end-points in one data source definition.

New data sets include:

• Streaming Datasets 
• Push Datatests
• Cached Data Models for Dashboards

Streaming Datasets

Streaming Datasets adds the ability to have an external device/app send data to Wyn, which can stream the data to a dashboard. This is a typical case for monitoring control systems, hardware, and IoT devices.

Push Datasets

Push Datasets also allow an external device/app to send data to Wyn for visualization. This can also be used for monitoring control systems/IoT devices. Push Datasets differs from Streaming Datasets as it stores the data in a cache on the server. So historical data is also available and does not get lost.

Cached Data

Cached Data models are similar to the existing analytic models but allow gathering and merging data from multiple different data sources into one model for the dashboard. This provides analytical expressions in the dashboard for file-based/cloud data sources that do not follow the typical entity-relationship structure. 

Analytic Data Model Enhancements

• Added JSON data sources for Direct Query Models
• Allow for lookup data cached with the Direct Query Models
• Use Parameters in JSON data sources for data models
• Allow for using shared data sources to generate data models
• New data sources added in this release are also available in the analytic models
• Introduced support for Analytic Expressions in Analytic Models

Enhancements to the data models mean that the DBAs and Admins can use more data sources to create data models for end-users to use for their dashboard design.

The addition of cached models introduces the ability to use analytic expressions with data from file-based sources and NoSQL sources like MongoDB, OData, etc.

Analytic Expression support for models provides the end-users with the capability to create ad-hoc expressions using data they have access to in the dashboard. This does not require intervention from the DBAs or IT Admins. 

Draft Document Management

Wyn 5.1 added a document publishing workflow to allow admins and document owners to control other users’ updates to the stock documents. This allows for controlling updates to ensure security rules and data governance is maintained. 

Other draft document management enhancements include:

• Wyn 5.1 allows standardizing the workflow to update/modify reports and dashboards in larger deployments. 
• Allows the execution and review of data governance and security rules to ensure they are implemented correctly in document modifications. 

Additional Supported Deployment Scenarios

This release adds the ability to deploy Wyn in a fully distributed environment in clusters behind standard network load balancers. It allows for scripted provisioning and deployment architecture maintenance using Kubernetes and scripts. These enhancements are important for SaaS products to scale as their user base increases.

Distributed Document Caching Service

In WynReports, a distributed document cache service allows further report caching functionality. The report caching feature allows the server to store the binary output of the rendered report. This improves report rendering performance by storing the context-relevant output of rendered reports for a preset time period. 

Customer Requested Features

As always, our customers are an important element of Wyn’s product roadmap! 

The following customer-requested features have been implemented in the Wyn 5.1 release:

Document Management

• Support for a manual refresh of datasets using a manual task execution. 
• Added functionality to back refresh the dataset cache
• Copying documents also copies the categories for that document
• Adding Thumbnails to Reports for a preview of the report layout

Platform Integration and API

• Token Exchange for Single Sign On (SSO) with for redirect and embedded scenarios
• Add a setting for Global Token Expiry
• Encrypt HTTPS Certificate Password
• API for supported portal languages and language preference usage in CSP
• Get Dataset information via API and export to Excel/CSV

Security Enhancements 

• Role-based Document Portal Columns visibility 
• Remember the sort order of columns in the document portal 
• Allow Organization admins to manage the users in their organizations and sub-organizations

Data Access Enhancements 

• Update Dataset versions in batch mode for multiple reports
• Show Local date/time data in the timezone of logged in user

Laurie Smith

Laurie A. Smith is the Product Marketing Manager for Wyn Enterprise. She managed content development at the Developer Tools Division before moving to the Wyn Enterprise Business Intelligence Team. Laurie holds an MFA in Film and Digital Media Production from Chatham University, an MBA & a Master’s Degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA.

In addition to working in technology, she also loves beekeeping, the horror movie genre, and carefully cultivating sunflowers.

Find her on LinkedIn.