MicroStrategy ONE

Use the MicroStrategy Command Center for iOS Mobile Devices

You can use MicroStrategy Command Center to propagate changes made on one mobile device to other mobile devices, such as iPads, clustered across a peer-to-peer network. A selection on one mobile device drives changes to all of the other clustered devices.

This feature can have many applications, but a very important one is simulating a specialized operations center. Organizations often have such a center, where executives can see all of their important business metrics on a wall of screens. Command Center lets you simulate an operations center for a fraction of the cost. For example, you can cluster a number of iPads, with one acting as the controller and the others projecting onto multiple large flat screen devices. Each iPad can present data at a different level or in a different format.  You can then use the controller iPad to simultaneously send selections to all of the screens, allowing executives to see all of their key information at once rather than having to drill down into the data.

The technique that MicroStrategy uses to cluster mobile devices for Command Center is called a conference.  One user opens a document on his or her device and starts a conference. Then any other users whose devices are in the same subnet can join that conference. Changes made by any user in the conference are propagated to the devices of the other users who have joined the conference. However, a typical use case is to have one user's device controlling the conference.

To use MicroStrategy Command Center, first make sure that you have met the prerequisites and installed the MicroStrategy Mobile SDK. Once you have done this, open the MicroStrategy Mobile project, add a customizations property, compile the application, and run it on every device where you want Command Center to be enabled, as described below:

Command Center currently supports only changes made to attribute selectors that include specific attribute elements, but not metric selectors or attribute selectors that exclude specific attribute elements.  Linked drilling manipulation is also not currently supported. Selections are based on either the control name or the source attribute. As long as users who have joined the conference have run documents with supported selectors that have the same name, the changes are synchronized on every device in the conference, regardless of whether the users have the same document open.

Setting Up Command Center: Enabling collaboration

To enable Command Center for the MicroStrategy Mobile application, you set one customization property as described below:

  1. Open the MicroStrategyMobile project in Xcode.  
  2. Add the following property to MSTRSettings.plist or MSTRCustomizations.plist and set its value to YES, as shown below:

CollaborationEnabled (BOOL) = YES

  1. Run MicroStrategy Mobile on any mobile device where you want to use Command Center.

Using Command Center: Starting, joining, and leaving a conference

Once you have enabled Command Center as described above, a new Conference menu icon appears on the mobile device where MicroStrategy Mobile is running, allowing a user to start, join, or leave a conference. When a user taps on the Conference menu icon, two options are displayed—Start Conference and Join Conference.

  • Starting a conference

    When a user taps on Start Conference, a shared session, or conference, is initiated. The conference name is the name of the device whose user starts the conference.  It is visible to all users in the subnet. The Conference menu icon changes to indicate that the user is currently part of a conference.

  • Joining a conference

    When a user taps on Join Conference, a list of all conferences running in the subnet is displayed. When the user taps a specific conference in the list, he or she joins that conference. The Conference menu icon changes to indicate that the user is currently part of a conference.  

  • Leaving a conference

    When a user who is currently part of a conference taps on the Conference icon, a prompt is displayed, asking for confirmation to leave the conference. If the user who started the conference decides to leave, the conference is terminated, and all users who are part of the conference get a message indicating that the conference has ended. If the user who wants to leave simply joined the conference, the conference remains active after the user leaves. Once a user leaves a conference, future changes made by other users in the conference are no longer propagated to that user's device.