You might already heard rumors about a new MashZone version. Yes indeed, our developers are currently working hard on finalizing it. Today I got my hands on the first release candidate of all new MashZone 2.0.0. Although we are going to publish later this month I decided to blog about one of the new features today.
Before I explain things I invite you to get yourself an impression of what will be possible:
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Yes, that is a screen shot of my current iGoogle page and MashZone resides directly within. The speedometer even updates right after the underlying data source does -- reflecting the most recent figures all the time. So what happened to MashZone? How does it interact with iGoogle?
As you might already know each MashApp is addressed by a URL. And with MashZone 2.0.0 you can deactivate the MashZone branding, i.e. its title bar. So my one speedometer MashApp might look very familiar if opened in MashZone directly. In contrast if the branding is hidden it is just about your content.
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So the all new feature is an opt-in -- you may use it for selected MashApps to display them at locations you visit frequently. You activate it by invoking the Share dialog (in case you use the Free Edition, yes MashZone supports user management in Professional Edition).
From here you can copy the MashApp's link -- even specifying more options, like hiding MashZone's branding.
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As you can see, you can even deactivate the authentication, if your MashApp should be accessible for anybody -- nobody will ask you for passwords.
To finally embed the URL into iGoogle I utilized the iFrame Gadget. Just add it to your page, paste the MashZone URL into it and stay always updated.
Of course the new URL feature is not only about iGoogle. You can embedd MashApps whereever you want. All you need is a website which is capable of rendering iFrames (and Flash of course). I think this could be interesting for your Intranet pages...
If you are interested in MashZone 2 I encourage you to stay tuned during the next days/weeks as we are going to present more news.
Note: See this post for a list of other articles about MashZone 2.0. You might be also interested to join the ARIS MashZone group at ARIS Community.
Hi Stephan,
very interesting... Providing this feature you are now more and more approaching the defence line of the SAP Business Objects tool XCelsius which adresses very similar if not even identical target groups like Mashzone does. The former (small) difference up today was the missing integration of Mashzone in e.g. SAP Portals. This seems to be gone away in the upcoming next release. From now on you are directly competing with SAP BO XCelsius.
It will be interesting for me to compare both products in the near future. I keep the fingers crossed.
One further point..., it would be nice to hear more in detail what has been done in the backend side of the upcoming release (transformations, import of Excel pivot table files...)
Keep up the good work.
Best regards,
Joachim
I assume this Share MashApp functionality is available only in Professional Edition ?
Indeed, this feature is restricted to higher Editions.
Starting with Professional Edition you are able to restrict access to specific MashApps or data feeds.
On top of this Enterprise Edition enables you to promote a MashApp to be visible to anonymous audiences. This means: to view this MashApp no authentication is required. Anyone who knows the URL is eligable to view.
