Welcome ARIS MashZone – Free version for ARIS Community members available

2010 will witness a new age of reporting with the release of ARIS MashZone 1.0 www.mashzone.com. This new ARIS product enables everybody to create cool business mashups in minutes. The times that you have to wait for IT to provide you with new, customized reports are over. Now you just create them yourself the way you want them to be and pass them to your management, and believe me, they will be impressed.

I do know what I am talking about because I did the same thing: I created a MashApp (mashup combining different data sources creating a new application) for this event series. The MashApp shows my key performance indicators (KPI): registrations, attendees, feedback. Usually, my boss received Excel sheets and two status PPTs from me each week. Of course, he also got this kind of information from others, as well. Somehow, though, he was never able to store the latest file properly. I guess this is a common problem at these hierarchy levels ;-) Well, then I shared my MashApp with him and he loves it, because it is up-to-date, easy to read and interpret, and looks really fresh. He just bookmarks it and always gets the latest reports. The times of desperately looking for the latest Excel file are definitely over.

Reporting without departmental boundaries becomes a reality. You can mash up event reporting with your sales pipeline, with your Yahoo finance feeds, with your HR system, with your balanced score card, your forecast, your weather information, basically with everything you want.

However, how do you create such a MashApp?

Step 1: Obtain data

You need to figure out which data you want to work with. Of course, you need the necessary rights to access the data. Then you should think about the KPIs you want to visualize in the MashApp. MashZone supports CSV, XML, Excel, Open XML, ARIS PPM, and Web Services from Amazon, Google, Reuters, Yahoo etc . You can, of course, also use Excel-based SAP reporting to work with data from SAP systems, for example.

Step 2: Combine data

Each data source can be a data feed. You can merge feeds, you can aggregate, apply arithmetic, etc. You can work with the data to get your desired results. MashZone has a feed editor which supports you to do so.

Step 3: Visualize data

After you worked with your data feed, you need to visualize it. For this, MashZone has a Composer which provides you with a wide range of components, such as speedometers, charts, tables, traffic lights maps, etc.

Step 4: Share your data

After you created your MashApp you can easily share it throughout your organization. Others can either read it or, if they have the necessary rights, modify it, too. Data turns into transparent information and finally into knowledge.

All Tutorials are also available in German: http://www.mashzone.com/de/tutorials

Free version for ARIS Community Members:

Some of the Community members might already have recognized that there is a MashZone box in their community user profile (click: View Your Profile). In this box, you find a link for downloading ARIS MashZone for free. Use it to view sample MashApps. To create new or modify existing ones you need the free license key which you can request free-of-charge on your profile, too. To upgrade to the Personal or Professional Edition visit: www.mashzone.com.

This is where you will also find more video tutorials and sample MashApps for Marketing, Sales, HR, and other departments. Our ARIS Community features a dedicated MashZone group to help the users connect and exchange experiences: http://www.ariscommunity.com/group/aris-mashzone Please use this group to let us know how you use ARIS MashZone and which features you would like to have in the next releases.

Have fun mashing!