Where are your users developing shared dashboards?

Question

Hi,
I'm wondering how other organizations handle dashboard and report development in OBIEE.  Do you allow your users to modify their shared dashboards and reports in production?  Or do they make their changes in another environment (TEST, DEV, etc) which later get promoted/copied to production?  If they are making changes in production, are your users accepting that a shared dashboard they use might change without notice?
I'm just trying to get an idea of best practices.
Thanks,
Tony

Answer 1

Hi Tony,
This is quite an interesting point to think about. To me, the best practice is
1. Allocate everybody a shared folder in production (In other words in OBIEE; My Shared Folder), so they could develop their own content at will.
2. As most of the organizations do have a BI development team  (If not, at least a support team!!), hand over the control to them to publish these dashboards to a wider audience, if the users believe they have quite some intelligent dashboards that are shareable.
This particular process has quite some benefits; For ex
1. A quick look by the BI team to understand the content developed and analyze if this is quite reasonable.
2. With data level restrictions in place, the users' content might not be really shareable with other users.
3.Let the BI team tune the reports if needed, just to make sure they scale under heavy loads.
and many more..
Do let me know if you have any different perspective.
-Dhar