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Press Clipping - February 7, 2000;;;

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PC Week

Laura Chabrow
InformationWeek

Manhasset, NY  

Visualization Software: Looking For A Market


Simple, familiar graphical images are often the most easily adopted by business users. Artisan Entertainment Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., uses bar and line charts that show sales over a period of time to enhance traditional text sales and special promotions reports for its president and marketing managers. "If you're an executive being presented with reams of data, it helps to get information in a form where you can readily see the trends that are occurring," CIO Leo Collins says. Graphs deliver the big picture.

 

Artisan, which distributes about 6,000 video and DVD titles to retailers and video stores, creates its reports using Zinnote. Zinnote represents the simplest form of out-of-the-box visualization tools and works only on a Windows platform. It creates reports for presentation as Microsoft Word documents or Web pages, without additional interactive or drill-down features. Artisan uses Zinnote's scheduler feature to trigger end-of-week report production and dissemination every Friday night. Zinnote pulls the data from a SQL database and formats the reports into Word documents in public folders with file-level security.

 

Some recipients receive the reports as E-mail attachments, but Zinnote can also produce reports in HTML format for Web pages, and Artisan executives will soon be able to view their Zinnote reports on the company's intranet. That will make it easier for them to access data when they travel. Remote access to public folders requires the files to be attached to a specific remote location; Web pages do not.

 

Artisan is considering expanding its use of Zinnote for financial reporting to show revenue and expenses by business unit, and for Web-site tracking. Many of Artisan's movies have their own Web sites, each of which gathers statistical information on the number of visitors and which of the site's pages are viewed. Collins would like to use Zinnote to produce graphical reports showing the company's overall online traffic.