Benefits of BI Connector

The Business Intelligence (BI) Connector feature lets you do more with your SuiteProjects Pro data. It extends the reporting capabilities of SuiteProjects Pro and lets you access your SuiteProjects Pro data easily from other applications, including most BI tools. You can then combine SuiteProjects Pro data with information from other systems in your existing BI tools to create sophisticated reports.

The BI Connector feature has the following advantages over other methods you can use to work with your SuiteProjects Pro data in your preferred BI tools:

• Automation — Schedule your reports to run and update your published report data at regular interval. Your published list data is updated in real-time. Depending on your BI tools, you can schedule automatic refreshes to get the latest published resource data and ensure that your dashboards and reports are always up-to-date. The BI Connector feature cuts out the need to export your report or list data as CSV files and import the data in other systems over and over again.

• Security — The BI Connector feature follows the same security best practice as SuiteProjects Pro. All data is encrypted in transport using the industry standard transport layer security (TLS) protocol. Your published list and report data is stored securely on SuiteProjects Pro servers. You can remove published resources at any time. You must enter your SuiteProjects Pro sign-in details to access published resources. You can only access published resources if the BI Connector feature is enabled for your account and if you have the relevant role permissions. Data access through the BI Connector feature follows the same privileges and restrictions as in SuiteProjects Pro. Account administrators can control access to the BI Connector functionality by role permission.

• Portability — Publishing and accessing data to and from the BI Connector preserves the original data types, whereas data exported as a CSV file is saved as text, even if the values were numbers in SuiteProjects Pro.

• Simplicity — Connect BI tools to your published resource data without the need to write any code. Most modern BI tools can connect to external data sources and use wizards to guide you through the data connection. Follow the vendor documentation for the product you want to connect to your published SuiteProjects Pro resources. Little maintenance effort is required, if any, after your tools are connected to the published SuiteProjects Pro resources.

The BI Connector feature also extends the capability of the User Scripting feature in SuiteProjects Pro by letting you access your list and report data in form and scheduled scripts. You can use published lists like custom queries — this makes a sophisticated level of search and sorting available before you start processing the data in your scripts.