Welcome fellow Qlikizens to Qlikster - A place where I plan to post reasonably regular entries on, or at least loosely related to, the subject of integrating QlikView analysis, functionality and general goodness into various web and desktop environments.
First off, a brief introduction.
As co-founder and chief techie at Industrial CodeBox, a QlikTech partner company, I have been working a great deal with QlikView integration over the past few years. Some readers may even have met us at Qonnections 2006 in Philadelphia where we were exhibiting our range of (fantastically confusingly named) products - ZMS, ZSC and ZSW.
We were a little ahead of the curve back then as there were really no other tools or applications available for embedding QlikView content into websites and portals. I am really pleased that ZSC and ZSW went on to become the QlikWeb Workbench and QlikView Web Parts for Sharepoint which, at the end of 2008, were taken over by QlikTech. (ZMS was actually discontinued a long time ago when the neat 'auto generate ZFC' feature was added into QlikView).
We are also pleased to be able to continue to work closely with QlikTech on these products and also in supporting a number of customers in utilising them to integrate QlikView powered functionality into their websites and other applications (I'll try and post about a few of these in the future to illustrate some of the capabilities and ways in which the QlikView engine can be utilised to add great search and navigation functionality into a website - In many cases you probably wouldn't even recognise it's QlikView).
In these past years working on integration solutions we have gained a lot of experience, particularly in using the qvpx protocol (which supports the communication between QlikView Server and the Zero-Footprint Client) to develop custom controls, visualisations and other features for web sites, typically using javascript/html/css as well as server side .NET components. We also work with .NET desktop applications, both using the qvpx protocol and also the QlikOCX control (this will actually be the subject of my next post, sort of..), to add QlikView functionality into the application.
I hope that at Industrial CodeBox we will continue to innovate as we did with the QlikWeb WorkBench and Sharepoint Controls, and that Qlikster will be one place where I can discuss some of the products, ideas and other work which we are involved with. I think it should be interesting to other developers who are keen on exploring how QlikView can be used outside of the 'traditional BI' sphere as well as customers who are looking at ways in which QlikView can be used to power their own websites and applications.
Well that's all for the opening post but I'll be following up with a new entry soon which might be of interest to anyone looking for enhanced integration between QlikView and Excel.
