By scaling up to an enterprise application, we are allowed to share information. An understanding of the interaction between the underlying technology and your current technology environment, along with how that can be used to deploy your licensed application while securing your information, is useful.
When scaling up to an enterprise application, security of data becomes an issue. QlikView security can be integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, with NTLM (Windows NT LAN Manager), and with third-party security (this requires QlikView Server Enterprise Edition). Further information on setting up security and integrating it with your environment is available when the license is purchased.
To manage large deployments of QlikView, use the QlikView publisher component, which is an administrative interface for maintaining the QlikView analyses. QlikView publisher enables the reloading of data to a QlikView analysis on a periodic basis to ensure that the most current data is available. QlikView Publisher connects to the security directory servers within your organization, and applies the user security rules to the QlikView analysis to ensure appropriate user access. That way, if a user can see parts of the data but not all, he/she will have the correct secure access. QlikView publisher is licensed on a per-server basis and includes a separately licensable option for PDF report distribution capabilities.
QlikView is an in-memory BI pioneer using an inference engine that maintains associations in the data. Aggregations are calculated as needed for use by multiple people. QlikView caches the data in memory and uses proprietary technology to compress the data down to as much as 10 percent of its original size. The cached data helps optimize the power of the computer processor(s) for the fastest user experience possible.
The QlikView server component supports authentication and security models to ensure appropriate user access. Additionally, it supports concurrent access to the analyses by large user groups. QlikView server is designed to maximize the processing power of standard multi-core servers by spreading calculations over all the available CPU cores. The QlikView server can be deployed across more than one physical server into clusters to provide fault tolerance and additional scale.
For large enterprise deployments, multiple QlikView servers and QlikView publishers can be clustered to provide load balancing and fail-over capabilities.
QlikView publisher, QlikView Web parts for Microsoft SharePoint®, and QlikView Workbench are additional licensed modules of QlikView Server. QlikView Web parts for Microsoft SharePoint® and QlikView Workbench require the QlikView Server Enterprise Edition. Install them by purchasing and applying for a license to a QlikView Server. QlikView recommends that QlikView Server and Publisher reside on separate, dedicated server machines with no other applications running for the optimal performance of a QlikView deployment.
The ability to bring in multiple sources of secure data is part of the underlying technology of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box, QlikView can connect to ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data sources, as well as to Microsoft Excel. Developers can use the open QVX (QlikView data exchange) format for importing non-standard data sources into QlikView.
When you purchase an Enterprise Server license, in addition to the sources you could already connect to, you will receive connectors to the non-ODBC data sources, Salesforce.com and Informatica. There is an additional charge for the SAP NetWeaver® connector.
The documents published on a QlikView Server can be accessed by different clients including the Internet Explorer plugin, AJAX Zero Footprint, and several mobile clients such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. It is now possible to distribute a QVW file to e-mail recipients defined in a field in the document. See QlikCommunity for tested devices and version details.
On mobile devices, users get a complete QlikView experience with interactive analysis and rich visualization. The mobile application is free to download and works with any QlikView 11 server license. Some of its important features are as follows:
- Delivery of the full QlikView business discovery experience across desktops, laptops, and mobile platforms
- Recognizing mobile devices and touch-enabling apps as needed
- Offering a single-object display mode on handheld devices for a more intuitive user experience
For more information about mobile device security for QlikView, download the document DS-Technical-Brief-QlikView-on-Mobile-Security-EN.pdf (by searching on Google).