Dundas Data Visualization Inc, is well-known to SSRS developers. Microsoft had earlier acquired their SSRS controls (Charts, Gauges & Map) and integrated them into SSRS 2008 & R2. These controls adds rich visualization to SSRS reports.
However one of the feature that SSRS miss is the real “Dashboard”. Dundas seized this opportunity and have released a Dashboard. It is Silverlight based ASP.NET application. It has a lot of features like Mashup, ability create dashboard on OLTP & OLAP data and many more. This link can give you more info on these feature.
I am using this tool for couple of months now and thought of writing down my observations
(1) Easy to learn…. Every thing is controlled by configuring properties. Most of the time your effort will be spent in understanding each properties and its impact on the visualization.
(2) Support is good. Got immediate responses.
(3) Since this tools is pretty new (2 to 3 years in the market) and the user base is less (compared to SSRS), apart from Dundas articles you would not find much material in the NET.
(4) Like SSRS subscription, Dundas Dashboard has a scheduler. However it does not support any other format other than image
(5) You cannot change the data source dynamically. The environment I work is a distributed one with hundreds of database server. SSRS provides the ability to change the connection strings dynamically . However this is not feasible in Dundas by default. You may have to go for a custom data provider to achieve this.
(6) Troubleshooting is bit difficult. When error occurs, it throws the whole .NET error stack. Most of the time, it does not pinpoint which section or object error out.
