Tools Consolidation

Information Builders continues to enhance its WebFOCUS product line and add new capabilities and tools in order to meet customer requirements. In recent years, this has meant applying new technologies to provide a rich, modern web-based experience for users of WebFOCUS. To this end, in WebFOCUS 8, several legacy tools and interfaces, as well as some stabilized product options, are consolidated. The WebFOCUS 8 Tools Consolidation Statement is available from the Information Builders InfoResponse Online website (https://techsupport.informationbuilders.com/). To provide advanced notice of the WebFOCUS 8 Tools Consolidation, a CTSS Advisory email notification was distributed on November 30, 2011 to InfoResponse Online subscribers.

The legacy web tools consolidation includes the retirement of the Report Assistant, Graph Assistant, Power Painter, and Advanced Graph Assistant tools. Information Builders has a general policy of ensuring that our customers receive upgrades and new features as a standard part of their maintenance contracts. In this case, Information Builders is extending that program. Customers who have licensed Report Assistant and Graph Assistant under the Analytical Reporter or other licensing arrangements, upon upgrading to WebFOCUS 8 are entitled to trade those licenses in for no-cost InfoAssist Basic licenses. InfoAssist Basic, a subset of WebFOCUS InfoAssist, contains the capabilities found in Report Assistant and Graph Assistant. Contact your local Information Builders representative regarding Power Painter and Advanced Graph Assistant capabilities, which require the WebFOCUS InfoAssist license.

The web consolidation also includes the retirement of the following Java® Applet-based interfaces and tools, which will eliminate the requirement to have a specific release of the Java VM present on each end-user machine.

For Developer Studio, the Graph Assistant and the Managed Reporting Publish Utility are retired. The Developer Studio Graph option will utilize InfoAssist charting. The Developer Studio HTML Composer tool is available to create HTML launch forms for Managed Reporting procedures. Customers who have active licenses for Developer Studio will receive this functionality as part of their standard maintenance contract.

The functionally stabilized product options that have been consolidated and discontinued as of WebFOCUS 8 are:

See the following product notifications for additional information for each of the consolidation areas including functionality available to evaluate in WebFOCUS 7.7, which is also available from the WebFOCUS 8 Tools Consolidation Statement.


WebFOCUS