InfoCaptor is available through the cloud, or can be installed locally – in both cases it provides a browser interface. Technically this is a very competent offering, with a bewildering number of chart types, and the facility to easily create and distribute dashboards.
The drag and drop interface means business users can create their own, ad-hoc BI solutions and data visualisations, and a large number of database and other data source connectors mean that composite reports and charts can be easily created. The widgets (various chart components) are said to be ‘data aware’, meaning that they can accept everything from manually entered data to database connections and connections to web services.
Visualisations include: Pivot Tables, Fixed Width Pivot, Heatmap, Symbol pivot, Vertical Group Bar, Vertical Stack Bar, Horizontal Group Bar, Horizontal Stack Bar, Horizontal Bullet, Vertical Bullet, Line Chart, Area Chart, Scatter, Bubble, Bubble + line, Bar line dual, Bar Scatter dual, Chord / Circos, Circle Pack Hierarchical, Sunburst Hierarchical, Linear Tree Hierarchical, Treemap Hierarchical. Chart types include: Bar Chart (vertical), Double or multi Bar chart (vertical), Stacked Bar Chart (vertical), Bar Chart (horizontal), Pie Chart, Donut Chart, Line Chart, Radar/Polar Chart, Funnel Chart, Gantt Chart, Bipolar Chart, Progress Bar. And finally a range of dials and gauges are supported. This should meet the needs of most users – to say the least.
Drilldown options, as with most features of this product, go well beyond the norm, with drill down from one widget to another, from one widget to multiple widgets, from Grid to charts, from one chart to another chart, to a totally different dashboard, to external third party applications.
Alerts and notifications feature fairly strongly with visual, sound, motion and email alerts supported. Sharing of dashboards happens by making the url of the dashboard available to others. The dashboard scan be static (no updating) or dynamic – depending on need. Enterprise class user access control mechanisms (public sharing, private sharing, configure to work with your own LDAP groups), mean data can be seen only by those who should see it.
All in all, InfoCaptor is an extremely capable product. Unlike many of the products in this space that focus more on ‘bling’ than real capability, InfoCaptor will satisfy many needs and at a very reasonable cost. Take a look – the web site contains plenty of useful information, and is not a triumph of form over content, as so many product web sites are in this space.