Read Part 1 & Part 2 of this series if you haven't already. 

Last entry I worked up the basic origins and destinations for the data we have. Now we have to start turning this into something real, something concrete. The following processes include a whole soup of acronyms and other cryptic vocabulary. The most common thing I will probably use is the ETL acronym, which stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. This is the process of bridging the data to the various originations and destination and moving that data appropriately.

In the last entry I finalized the originations and destinations as shown below;

In my previous entry you may have noticed that I had posted SSIS with the Destination list.  Being one that corrects themselves when mistaken, I took it out, as it does not belong there.  The SSIS is our tool that will perform the ETL functionality for this project.

At this point we are finally going to get into the dirty bits of these pieces of technology, and how we need to tie them together.  I am going to attack them over the next few entries based on the order in the lists above.  The first item, is the Excel & Access 2007 customer relations listings from sales.  Here?s a description and a few shots of what this thing looks like.

The access database is setup with a very simple relational data schema.  This is shown below (click image for larger view).

You can see there are pretty standard pieces of data, in a generally normalized (3rd form for the most part) structure.  This is fine.

Next is a shot of the data entry screen for adding opportunities.  There are respective screens for customers and employees.  Everything needed for a basic customer list & tracking basic things.  Nothing too extravagant here either.  Again, all is fine.

Below is a simple report that shows the available opportunities that are open.

Another report showing the forecasts.

Below is another forecast sliced grid.

So all that seems normal enough.  But the processes are what makes things tricky.  If everyone just managed sales from the database, all would be right in the world.  The first thing that breaks this is that each sales person enters their sales during the day and other information in a spreadsheet that is not linked to the underlying database.  Someone each morning puts the previous days sales information.  This of course, breaks down data integrity.  Below is a sample sheet that is used each day.

One thing that Excel is used for, that doesn?t break reports is the lists of prospective customers to call.  As shown below.

Now that we have a break down of the Excel & Access Customer Relations Management Software, I will move onto the other pieces of technology in the next entry.  This is the data point that has the most prospective data risk, so I put it at the top of the list to cover first.  After I cover each of the systems, we will move into the architecture of the system overall.  So keep reading, more juicy bits to come.

So here is the lowdown on what I will be presenting, demoing, and showing to the attendees & anyone who is interested at Engage 2010.  If you are attending and have not signed up on the Engage Crowdvine Site, please do so.  There are some great conversations going on there.

One other thing I wanted to point out, is that you MUST attend the Ignite in New Orleans.  Ignite events are a blast!  Portland, Oregon regularly has some of the largest Ignite Events, and since we are bringing a whole lotta Portland love, and NOLA is well known for some great parties, I know the NOLA Ignite will be awesome!  So make sure to attend.

First off, Brian Gallagher and myself will be showing off some awesome technology for video tracking at the science fair break out sessions.  There will be a Tuesday Science Fair and a Wednesday Science Fair, and I will be there with Brian going over the tracking.  So if you miss us one day make sure to check it out the next day!

The next speaking session is the enterprise & business intelligence topic I have mentioned in some of my previous blog entries.  The session is titled Make Analytics Work across your Enterprise.  Our topic summarized is, The nerd of the Enterprise;  ETL, EPM, ERP, BI, CRM, and how the alphabet soup works together for real Enterprise Business Intelligence and Insight.

The final engagement I have is a topic near a dear to my work here at Webtrends.  Over a year ago a rock star team of developers; Rob D, James K, and myself started working on the Data Exchange, REST Web Services for Webtrends.  Of course now those have been in production and are now on v2.0 already!  Rob has gone on to rock the current iPhone Webtrends Application (Check out the Webtrends Blog Post Too) & James is coding away at some of the awesome infrastructure that keeps all the data flowing smoothly on the back end (to the web services, to the Insight UI, the whole thing ? James is awesome at that).  So we built these services many months ago and now I get to present them as a workshop session at Engage.  Open web services based on good clean REST Architecture Principles have always been an interest of mine and I have been and will continue to be stoked that we at Webtrends have these available for customers!  So be sure, if interested, to check out the Workshop:  The RESTful Way ? How to Use Webtrends REST Services.

Also for further reading, check out some of my past entries on REST Services;

• REST, So Many Nuances, The Self Signed SSL Cert Override
• REST Web Services Synchronous Request that points at the Webtrends Developer Network Blog Entry.
• Just a Bit More REST which has a really bad example of unit tests, which are more integration tests, running against some REST Web Services.
• File Extension ".svc" Annoyance
• RESTful .NET by Jon Flanders is probably one of the best books on the WCF based REST Services.  So if you are looking for a solid guide, this is a great place to get just that.

Alright.  Here I am working through some analytics trending of my Twitter, Facebook, www.adronbhall.com, LinkedIn, and other various sources of traffic.  Here's the frustrating part.  I don't mean a little frustrating, I am talking about a-grade I almost want to break something frustrating.  I have bit.ly, Webtrends Analytics, a database with cross-correlated results, a Twitter monitor in another window, and other little apps to track what is going on.  Where does most of this data come together?  In my head.  Why do I have to manage everything this way, it is damn frustrating!

So here is an idea, and I am just thinking outside the box here (as I always do since nobody will let me in the box anyway :p ).  How about these things get merged into a good solid single interface.  Maybe even some of the environments get rolled together in addition to the tracking analytics and reports.  How about a solid dashboard that allows drilldown into the various mediums to allow actual interaction with the data and platforms?  Imagine a dashboard, that reports the analytics for all these things but then lets you just kick in and start tweeting or posting the latest bits to Facebook.  Why have a half dozen or more applications and web sites open.

What we need here is some technology leadership.

Others have discussed this recently and are looking for some results.  Ok, some of you readers may be thinking, "do you not work for Webtrends Adron?  Go build this stuff!"  Well maybe others and I am, but I am still frustrated at not having it right now.  It seems this is something that is slowly slipping by in this industry and we need a centralizing effort for all these data points to help in actually making sense of them.

A fellow analytics & marketing professional, Rodica Buzescu writes in her blog Morphing Through Time a post titled Web Analytics ? Leaving a Lot to Be Desired.  She lays out the current analytics situation very clearly.  There is no tool that really bridges the data together easily.  Some BI Pros out there may say "oh but I have all that stuff together".  This may be true, but how much time and effort did that take?  What we need is a centralized management solution for this data.  Something to bridge the data together to make it actual, usable, and actionable information.

I have also had a number of conversations with Eric Peterson about various analytics on various platforms.  One such paltform is Twitalyzer (@twitalyzer), that he and @katzpdx have put together.  This is a prime example however, of a very useful tool, but something that lies outside of other tools.  The question is, how to integrate and what to integrate.

As an analytics advocate, practitioner, and developer myself I have one huge issue with a lot of my analytics that I use.  Webtrends Analytics & Data Mart help me bring most of those together.  However there are a number of things that are still disparate and segmented in the wrong areas.

So with this post as it stands, what do people want joined?  Where are all these data points that people want?  I think something good just may come out of this desire, but the ideas do have to come together solidly.  I have things I can?t disclose, but I know there are minds here at Webtrends thinking about bridging this gap right here and right now.

Part II of my Business/Enterprise Intelligence Series, check out part 1.

In the previous part of this ongoing series of getting the business intelligence and analytics pieces of the enterprise intelligence world figure out, I hit on the first step of the entire process. Collection of available data points. Not the desired data points, nice to haves, or might haves, but the available data points.

In this entry I will step past that and get into a little more of the technical depth of how these data points will be connected in the enterprise systems. More to the point, how they are not connected and will need to be in the enterprise.

A Quick Review, The Systems

• Point Of Sale (POS) w/ 300+ stores
• Webtrends Analytics tracking the Awe Widgets Inc Website
• Internal Accounting Software (IAS)
• In-house Built Customer Lists for Sales w/ Excel & Access

With the four systems we have a huge amount of actionable data points. So how do we connect all of these data points? That is the thorny question that comes up. Again, just like during the discovery of what data is available, we have a simple first step for this process.

Figure out the origin and destination!

That is really it. Of course, as anyone would concede, there is a lot in between. Without knowing where we are starting and where we need to end up though, finding the in between is in vain. Sure, one can make the mistake as many business intelligence projects do, and start building architecture before anyone knows or actually can use the architecture. This is a severe mistake, and I myself have literally seen millions of dollars get wasted only to have to start a project over, right in the middle of the original project. Do NOT become one of those projects, find the origin and destination!

In this case I am again, going to use my creative side and determine the operations of this company. Awe Widgets Incorporated is currently using SQL Server and has in house skills developed among their staff. That provides an easy option of moving towards SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and working with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for the ETL bits. Whatever other platforms are in between will be easily connected with these two tool stacks. So now I know my multiple originations, and my single point destination.

Moving on to the fun bits.

Now we have to figure out how we're going to get from our origination to our destination. This is where the trip becomes interesting. Just to make sure things stay clear, and list out what we have that we are working with.

So now we are starting to get somewhere.  We now where we are, what we have, and where we want to go.  Time to wire some things up, so stay tuned.  That will be in the next entry.  Also, if you are planning on attending Webtrends Engage in New Orleans, but sure to look up the Enterprise Intelligence session that I will be presenting with Heather Crince of Webtrends and Tony G. of Orbitz?

If you missed the previous entry in this series, check out Where is the Other Data Tracking?!  Where are My Acronyms?!?!

Where is the business intelligence?

This blog entry may instigate just a bit.  It will also be a little long for a blog entry. You've been warned.  I suppose though, if you know me & the work I do, that is not really something new.  I see something wrong, broken, or otherwise and I am likely to point it out and describe it in detail.

As I roll into 2010 coding, implementing, and rocking with Webtrends, I have noticed something lacking in the analytics industry.  I will add the clause that obviously Webtrends has people thinking about these things and actively working on this topic, but what I want to point out is a general issue.  Where is the other data, where is the existing data?

It seems, even though some company's kind of get to a certain point in connecting data points, not many really do.  The biggest reason is that most companies are just a few steps away from actually being able to do so.  The other even larger reason is, many do not realize what data should or should not be connected.

When someone starts pulling CRM (Customer Relationship Manager/Management), Analytics, POS (Point of Sale), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) data, and other sources into a single reporting repository we finally have real business intelligence.  Otherwise so many entities stumble through the land mines of data confusion.  I see this so much it really drives me crazy sometimes.

So how can a company or entity identify and connect these points of data?  It often starts with a ridiculously simple step.  At risk of oversimplifying things, let me just state the first step in getting out of the data confusion land mines is to first figure out your data.  Ask these things:

• What data does the business have?
• What data is currently used and available?

Do NOT ask what data you want, do NOT ask what may not be.  What you want to know first, and so many companies make this mistake, is to know what you know.  Do not, at the early stage of business intelligence information gathering start asking too many hypotheticals.  I promise the risk of failure increases exponentially for every hypothetical data point added.

Once you have identified what data is available, start figuring out how the data is related.  Once you understand the data you can then, and only then, make the huge leap to determining what data you want and how to get it to where you want.

Let me draw this out in a real world example.  Beware; I am using my creative mind now!

What we have so far, for Awe Widgets Incorporated, is several data points.

• Point of Sale/POS Systems in 300+ stores.
• Web Analytics (by Webtrends of course) tracking all sorts of great data points on the Awe Widgets Incorporated Website.
• Internal Accounting Software (Almost ERP, not really)
• In-house Built Customer Lists for Sales.

So there we go, four key pieces of tracking.  So how would they work together?  With a little further analysis (my key creative side now analyzes Awe Widgets Incorporated internal structure) and we find a few connections.

Correlation, POS to Webtrends Analytics

The POS System has a tracking identifier for customers which we can use to sync up with logged in users tracked via Webtrends Analytics.  This data can be used to derive who is and is not in stores purchasing.  In addition trending could follow the user flow to derive some actionable decisions on how to encourage online or store front shopping.  Just these two data points being connected add a lot of value.

Correlation, Internal Account Software ties to POS

Another data point tie in with the aforementioned POS & Webtrends data is the Internal Accounting Software (IAS).  The IAS holds information related to each sale, and other correlated information about how sales are going for the quarter, year, and other performance indicators.

Correlation, In-house Customer Lists for Sales

The sales department, in aggressive technical fashion has built a number of customer lists in Excel & Access.  The Access Application has a partially updated data store with a server based Excel file holding the updated piece of data about each of the sales person's current sales.  I know, I hear it now, every developer that is familiar with this scenario screaming, "OMG, you have your data in Excel AND Access, and it is supposed to have integrity, and be aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh noooooo!"  But you know, this @#$% happens.  : )  When things are like this, solutions get creative.

Tying Together the Pieces

Alright, this is when the awesome nerd bits start to happen.  But I have covered enough for this entry.  In the following entries on this topic I will step through this first data finding mission and start discussions on how to connect these sources and get that data mart, warehouse, or other middle tier piece into action.   I will continue on and lead into how the data can finally start telling a real story.  Because in the end, the real story is, somebody needs actionable data to act upon.  Does it really matter where it is?

Check out Part II of this series. 

Square

I was fumbling through my RSS feeds reading a few entries and found this one.  One of the quotes quoted in this article sums up a massive shift in business in the US.

"I can buy an iPod touch] for $200, get the app and I'm in business. I don't need a contract with AT&T or anything. I'm in business.  - Jack Dorsey in The Economist "

Think about that for a minute.  This brings a massive amount of consumer power back to the individual.  This brings back something that had been gone for a while now.  There are of course, hurdles to be leapt, bureaucracy to avoid, and other unseen glitches in this shift but the possibilities are awe inspiring for sure.

A number of my fellow developers & other assorted friends have mentioned Square.  I have not used it yet, nor have they, but we each see unique possibilities.  I for one, just like the straight forward, clean, and easy interaction the service has with customers.  That alone is refreshing.

Another friend has pointed out the empowering nature for smaller businesses.  This is really part of a shift that has been occurring, but now brings home the concept decisively.  Anybody can get hold of a iPhone, Droid, or otherwise and utilize something like Square.  Someone could run a transaction in their living room if they're selling their couch, or their TV, and run it against someone else's credit card.  That is an awesome idea.

Web Analytics, Please Toss the Waterfall

Over on the Web Analytics Demystified Blog, John Lovett inspires a Manifesto for Web Analytics.  Reading the Manifesto draws attention to another idea that keeps popping into my mind about the larger analytics realm into which web analytics is really becoming.  Web analytics is type specific to the web, but in reality it reaches well beyond that now.  If not in function in ideal, and bridging that ideal into a central analytics view for a marketing department, executive staff, or whoever needs the information available for decisions to be made.  Each of John's points of the manifesto are well laid out.

Several of the points; Listen to your constituents, roll up your sleeves, assimilate to the culture, and others point out something that many software developers may simply think of as good individual Agile Practices.

#7 however really hits home with me.  Actually solve the problem, John writes.  Too often, too many groups simply band aid things.  Of course, there are always times when band aids will do just fine.  But a simple test is to ask, will you throw away this solution?  If you do not intend to throw away the solution in the near future, then following #7, is fundamental to ongoing success.  I will just add, be proactive, solve the problem.

#8 I read with some disdain.  Waterfall, being a software developer, is a vulgar word in so many ways.  The Waterfall methodology has sunk more projects, wasted more millions, blown schedules, and all in all been a poor practice in software development.  HOWEVER, John is not talking about the Waterfall Methodology.  But boy did it trigger a negative response from me at first.  I have helped out John here and removed the vulgarity and put in place a more software developer friendly word.

Strategy Credo #8: Establish a central mind-map strategy. By this I mean strategy should flow from the headwaters of the organization and align with the corporate goals set forth by the executive team. Once your measurement team is clear and united on the goals, then identify objectives as the next tier in your central mind-map that supports the corporate goals (these are your business promises).

etc, etc, etc...  you get the idea at this point.  :)  Note:  John, I'm just giving you gruf, please don't take any offense.  ;)

That is it from me today.  Hope all have a great first work day of 2010.  Cheers!

A recent article The Next Big Bang by our Webtrends CEO, Alex Yoder, was published recently online via Teradata.  It got me thinking toward the technical aspects of what is within our reach in the analytics industry.  The industry as a whole has moved past the mere counting of visits & their respective users as numbers and moved to making the numbers actually represent the people.  That can be a weird statement, but I will clarify a bit more.

Years ago, one would setup a server and start tracking hits on a website.  Often these would be called views or page views.  What did that mean though?  Effectively it meant zero, zilch, nothing of any value.  You know only that a machine, or machines, made X number of views against a website.  One didn't know what kind of browser, device, PC, Apple, screen size, or if the views were even unique to a machine or possibly unique to a user.

Then everything changed, and this is still the past I am speaking about.  We finally started enabling detection of devices, browsers, screens, viewable, and types of visits.  This elaboration of data drastically altered what we could build for a website.  It made good design more measurable by audience participation.

A short time afterwards the industry was able to move forward and get into doing some further pre-analysis of this data.  This enabled more actionable and intelligent decisions being made from web analytics data.  The analytics data started creeping into the realms of business intelligence, general reporting, and actual information.

The next huge leap, which is close to where we are now, is the opening up of these sources of analytics data and bridging the final gaps in the Web, Enterprise, and E-commerce Architectures.  The complete full cycle evolution has occurred from IT, to Engineering, to Marketing and over to Sales.  A company can now integrate their data from analytics with their data from point of sale systems and derive true, daily, value from the decisions that can be made from these sources.

The Future Arrives

Now we are at a point, with the level of services and opening of data, that almost any valuable data point can be tracked and trended with high accuracy.  Gone are the needs for traditional media that leaves one with massive gaps in segmentation and individual directed content.  Today we have vastly greater capabilities.

We can analyze and provide data that helps companies at so many levels, such as tracking game play to pinpoint the fun parts versus the boring parts of a game.  We can derive the dead spaces in a web site, or better yet the hard to navigate areas of an actual brick and mortar storefront.  Even more analytics can provide and correlate tracking against the usage of a car or transit system, an airline boarding flow, and draw causable correlation between the very first steps a consumer takes the the purchase and beyond.  All because the data is open and cross-correlative.

This leads me to my next question.  What architectures have you found valuable?  What combination of data cross-correlated with analytics data have given you actionable measures?  What other devices, sites, and mechanisms provide a value to track, trend, and analyze?  I would love to hear what users have found useful in their own environments, so please leave a comment or three.  : )

Excited!

That is me right now.  I am stoked about the upcoming Engage 2010 for a few reasons.

1. The main reason is because the analytics industry & this field of technology is really interesting to me.  I dig crunching the numbers, working with our clients, and getting the results and analysis into useful, actionable numbers.  Being able to see & know our clients are able to act on those numbers is awesome.  Attending a conference like this provides an opportunity to talk with clients regarding their use of the technology.
2. Ideas grow at a rapid rate when this many smart people, with a common interest & goal are in one place.  Just talking with conference goers, thought leaders in the industry, and being able to talk on a one to one basis gives me, them, and everyone involved new ideas.  One never knows what may come out of a conference like this.  Whatever does, it is always exciting to think of the opportunities.
3. Ignite New Orleans.  If you have ever been to a Portland Ignite, these are really cool events.  Local, human, entertaining, and personal all come to mind to describe how these Ignite Events are.  To have one in New Orleans - or Nawlins' - will be a blast!  :)
4. I will be there speaking & working a workshop.  This will be the first time I have ever presented or done anything like this in New Orleans.  That adds all the more excitement to it.  I hope to see some familiar faces and many new ones.
5. I grew up just down the ole' Interstate, so New Orleans or as we often say Nawlins, is kind of a second home to me.  I enjoyed so much driving into this city from the east, over Lake Pontchartrain's Twin Span 5+ mile bridge or the 23+ mile Lake Pontchartrain's Causeway.  Better yet I really enjoyed rolling into the city on the Amtrak Crescent via the Norfolk Southern Lake Pontchartrain Bridge (See the awesome map).

This is shaping up to be a truly awesome event.  If you are going and would like to meetup, discuss some analytics, or just enjoy some music on Bourbon, St Charles, or Decatur just hit me up on Twitter @webtrendsadron.

As mentioned in my last blog entry, I have been on the hunt for some good charting displays.  I found visifire and here is the quick setup & display of some initial reports.  I used some sample data via trusty Webtrends Analytics 9 API, since we have a bit of example data about the office. ; )

Before even getting started, I am using Visual Studio 2010 beta2.  If you don't have access to this then your screen shots will appear a good bit different then mine, or simply you will not have the same screens I do at all.

First I downloaded the files needed.  The zip with the assemblies has the following files.

• GPL v3.txt and License.txt are text files about the respective licensing of the charting assemblies.
• Bin - This folder has the actual assemblies for Silverlight and WPF.
• Samples - This folder has, simply, samples in it.

Within the Bin folder there are four files.

I'm not really keen on their naming conventions, as the naming seems to be here or there, but it is easily understood.  I would rather just see something along the lines of Visifire.Charts.Sl.dll and Visifire.Charts.Wpf for instance.  But hey, one should not complain, these controls are awesome.

Next I added the assembly to another folder within the project I intend to use the charts in.  In this particular case, the project is a WPF Project, so I am just adding the WPF assembly.

Once you add the assembly make a reference to that assembly the way you would normally make the reference.

Now that we have the appropriate assemblies referenced we?ll throw some basic reports into a WPF User Control.  The next part of this process is were things get a little interesting.  Our next step is to go back out to the visifire site and use the report designer.  When you navigate to the report designer you will see this view.

Over on the left hand side of the designer there are various properties for the reports;  Chart, Data, Title, PlotArea, Legend, TendLine, AxisY, AxisX, AxisLables, ChartGrid, Tick, and Events.  Just below those menu items there is a radio button to select Silverlight or WPF.  Click on the WPF radio button.

I enabled a few others options.  For a complete duplication of the changes I made, check out the XAML snippet below.  I made some changes after the initial designer work was done.  My best practice is to set the basic report, a few data points, and then start working with it in Design Time & XAML view in VS 2010.  Otherwise the designer may redraw something and you want have an undo option.

 <vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=WPFVisifire.Charts" 

                  Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="0" Grid.ColumnSpan="2"

                  Height="300" BorderThickness="0" Theme="Theme3" View3D="True" AnimationEnabled="True" ColorSet="VisiBlue" LightingEnabled="True"   >

            <vc:Chart.Titles>

                <vc:Title Text="Visit Trending" FontSize="16" FontStretch="SemiCondensed" FontWeight="Bold" TextAlignment="Center" />

            </vc:Chart.Titles>

            <vc:Chart.AxesY>

                <vc:Axis Title="Total Visits" AxisType="Primary" />

            </vc:Chart.AxesY>

            <vc:Chart.Series>

                <vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Column" AxisYType="Primary" >

                    <vc:DataSeries.DataPoints>

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="1/1/08" YValue="351139" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="2/1/08" YValue="345254" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="3/1/08" YValue="318845" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="4/1/08" YValue="274316" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="5/1/08" YValue="277349" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="6/1/08" YValue="351139" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="7/1/08" YValue="345254" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="9/1/08" YValue="318845" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="10/1/08" YValue="274316" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="11/1/08" YValue="297349" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="12/1/08" YValue="237349" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="1/1/08" YValue="353139" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="2/1/08" YValue="385989" />

                        <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="3/1/08" YValue="435989" />

                    </vc:DataSeries.DataPoints>

                </vc:DataSeries>

            </vc:Chart.Series>

        </vc:Chart>

You will notice I also added a bit of sample data.  In my actual XAML form things are setup as shown below.

<Window x:Class="ClientApp.PrototypeReportView"

        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

        Title="PrototypeReportView" Height="500" Width="500">

    <Grid Background="Black">

        <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

            <ColumnDefinition></ColumnDefinition>

            <ColumnDefinition></ColumnDefinition>

        </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

        <Grid.RowDefinitions>

            <RowDefinition Height="Auto"></RowDefinition>

            <RowDefinition Height="Auto"></RowDefinition>

            <RowDefinition Height="*" />

        </Grid.RowDefinitions>

    </Grid>

</Window>

Under the </Grid> and above the </Window> tags I added the chart XAML above.  Now simply run the application and view the chart.  Mine shows up as shown below.

The data I plugged in is some sample data from the Webtrends DX Web Services.  In the near future I am intending to hustle up some connections to actual Webtrends DX Web Services, so I can show how to wire up to some live, changing, or even real time data.

The engineering group at work got v9.0 up and live.  If you have an account you can check it out at http://insight.webtrends.com.  Props out to Justin, Rob, Joel, James, Adam, David and the whole crew working on the release.  Great job!

Here's a few of the new bits that really provide some great insight (pun intended?) into activity on a site.  In this case I'm comparing the profile I have setup for Loosely Coupled Human Code Factory.

(Click on the larger for a full screen shot of the image).

In the image I have the red arrows pointing at the RSS feed, which is actually an existing feature, but this is a perfect example of wiring in an RSS feed so one can see the effects of the entry?s increase in hits after posting.  In addition looking a little further back on the graph you can see where the blog experienced a decrease after a posting.  Looking at the grey bars, which represent weekends, one can see that posting a blog entry on Friday or Saturday usually makes for bad readership, especially on a tech blog like this.  But posting on a Monday, Tuesday, or even Wednesday usually bodes well for readership.

In this image I've shown what clicking to add a Note looks like.  Adding Notes is a new feature.  Just hover over the Notes bar on the left hand side and click on the + that appears.  It will show this modal focused window as the image shows.  Enter the information for the note and set the date & time, if it is for a global setting or the current profile and the privacy setting.  Once done just click on save.

As you can see, the note now shows up as A on the chart.  In the display below the note text shows.

This is a great way to put markers into charts to show significant events such as a product release or something similar that would cause an increase or decrease in visitors, visits, or other measure.

This image shows the Twitter Feed I have, that I often associate links with to this blog or others.  I started tracking it to show the tweets in the description area and to see when a particular tweet or link posting increases views of the particular link posted.

That is my quick multi-second tour of the new Webtrends Insight interface, hope you enjoyed.  Hopefully I?ll have more to post real soon so keep an eye on this blog and the Webtrends' Developers' Blog for DX and DC.