MicroStrategy ONE
Gather information about your user audience
Ask yourself who the audience is for the document you plan to create. Questions you should have answers to include:
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What is the main topic area the document needs to address? In other words, at a general level, what do users need to know?
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What level of detail do users need? For example, sometimes executive level users only want to see a few key metrics of certain data. Other analysts may need to see very detailed financial numbers or inventory counts.
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What types of documents do users expect? Higher level executives sometimes have expectations about how data is displayed in a document, so it can be helpful to ask what types of documents they are used to receiving, and whether it is important to try to adhere to that data display style.
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Who is your universe of users made up of?
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If your universe of users is extremely diverse, consider making documents as flexible as possible for each user who executes them, by adding prompts. A prompt asks users questions about the results they want to see on a document, and then submits the appropriate query to the data source. For an introduction to prompts, see the Basic Reporting Help.
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Your universe of users may include different security requirements. For example, you may need a single document for a group of users, but that group includes both external and internal users, and you want to restrict some data from external view. You must confirm that appropriate security is in place for a document's underlying objects, and that security filters are in place to control row-level access to data. Object-level security is performed using ACLs, or access control lists.
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Security filters and ACLs are generally implemented by your system administrator, but one or both may be under the control of your project designer. For details on security filters, ACLs, and other security features, see the System Administration Help.
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