Expand Your Audience

Report authors in Halo can use a variety of tools in order to convert data into insights. Documents can include multiple queries, digging deep into the available data sources, with analysis results displayed as Tables or used to produce visually appealing and highly insightful pages with charts, widgets, and infographics, which can help digest the data faster and reach better conclusions.

The possibilities to combine queries and pages into comprehensive, structured reports, as well as the powerful interaction and parameterization options available, allow for straightforward clustering of insights. Content Services, with its flexible options of managing your reports in a structured way, using the workspaces, collections, and lists, makes it very easy to return to existing analysis for further analysis or as a basis to look into a different context.

In corporate reality, report authors are very often not the only or even the final consumers of the insights they produce. The hard work spent on shaping the report so that it presents the right data in the best possible way very often benefits other members of the organization, who rely on the report author to provide the information they need to make their daily decisions. Such users are very often not expected to be proficient in working with data analysis tools such as those provided within Halo Reports authoring mode. Instead, they rely on data analysts to provide them with ready-to-use insights in the form of tables or charts. This often makes data analysts the bottleneck in the process, requiring them to rely on the distribution of static exports (for example, PowerPoint presentations or Excel workbooks) of the analyses they prepared and often to fine-tune the reports to provide additional or different information.

This is where Halo Reports can significantly improve the process of distributing insights by leveraging the interactive viewing experience available in Halo. Not only does Halo enable report authors to share any outputs they generate with other members of the organization, but it also does not require those additional users to have access to the same powerful authoring tools to analyze the reports. Halo Reports Viewing mode enables the report author to allow non-authors to view the report without the need to worry about its underlying definitions, while simultaneously keeping the report interactive and flexible along the lines drawn by the author, who remains in full control of the content presented. Report Viewers, on the other hand, receive content that remains flexible and interactive, while still compatible with Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF exports if needed.

Let’s dive into the details of Halo Reports Viewing experience.

Your report is ready. It has all the relevant information included, structured into insightful pages. You have parameterized the report to allow flexible interaction with the underlying data within the boundaries that you consider relevant for the analysis. As the next step, you would like to give access to this report to other members of your organization, without allowing them to affect the report structure or underlying data definitions in an uncontrolled way. Halo not only makes it very easy to achieve, but also provides you with tools to control how the reports are discoverable. 

There are two main options for you to make your report accessible to other users.

When in Content Services, you can use the Manage Access option for a specific document to directly grant access to the report to specific user(s) or to one of the Teams defined within your organization.

You can choose to notify your new audience with an additional email sent automatically by the Halo system. Users will see such reports in the “Shared with me” section of Content. Note that you can choose if the additional audience should have Editor or Viewer access to the document you are sharing. Remember that users with Edit rights are able to modify and overwrite the documents shared with them, as long as they are licensed to use Storybuilding or Authoring mode within Halo. If you choose to share with others as Viewers only, you can be sure that no one will be able to introduce any changes to your document, as you will remain the only user in control of its content. It is possible to grant different access levels to different users, having certain coworkers act as coauthors of the documents, while others remain just viewers. Viewers will be able to view both Tables and Pages within the report, interact with them within the built-in interaction boundaries, and have access to additional settings and parameters if the author exposes them for use in Viewing mode. The reports will also be fully exportable.

You can easily organize your content into Lists, Collections, and Workspace for better discoverability. You can read more about these options in this article. Each of those organizational elements exposes the option to Manage Access as well - you can grant access to specific user(s) or predefined teams, as well as define the access level for various users or teams.

In this case, you can also choose to notify your new audience with an additional email. Note that if you grant access on a higher level of content organizational structure, e.g., you give access to a list, users will automatically get this level of access to anything included in that list now or in the future. Granting access this way will expose the content organization structure (that is, for example, Workspace -> Collection -> List) in the user Content Services menu as a Shared workspace. Note that if you only share one list from within a workspace, only this list will be exposed as part of that shared workspace for the additional users.

As mentioned earlier, users don’t need a full authoring license to be able to open the reports to which they were given access. This allows you to expand the reach of your analysis within Halo from just power users to anyone who might be interested in the content of your report. Note that the users need to be authorized to use the data that are used in the reports in order to be able to see all the results.

Once they get access to a specific report or to a workspace/collection/list that contains some reports, any interactive Halo Report can be opened by them in the Viewing mode of Halo Reports. Browsing in the Viewing mode prohibits the user from saving any changes in the shared report, which protects the content of the report. If users are only granted viewing access and are not allowed to use the Authoring tools within Halo Reports, they won’t even be able to see the underlying definitions for Pages and Tables, including the Query definitions, remaining exposed only to the actual end report in its interactive form.

Reports in Halo can contain any number and combination of Tables and Pages. Each of those can be viewed in a dedicated module with the Viewing mode.

The Compose module in the Authoring mode allows report authors to create visually appealing pages in a slide format, using a vast library of interactive visual elements such as charts, widgets, or shapes (see this ARTICLE to learn more). It is possible to request integration of your corporate identity definition, so that the reports are displayed using your organization's fonts and page layouts. Multiple separate pages can be created in order to convey a meaningful story within the report, or simply present multiple separate insights. Report viewers can view and interact with such pages in a dedicated page viewing section when in Halo Reports Viewing mode.

The page viewing section shows a list of page thumbnails that simplify user navigation across the report. A variety of reporting components support user interactions that are possible when viewing the page online, also in the Viewing mode, such as scrolling through tables or charts, or clickable series on visualizations.The report author can also decide to expose some additional visual settings or parameters controlling data context and report details, which can also be used in the Viewing mode.

For presentation purposes, Viewing mode supports full-screen display (which retains all the available interaction options).

It is also possible to export the report (or a subset of pages) to PowerPoint or PDF, as well as export the underlying data to Excel.

In addition to visual representation on slide-type pages, the report can also expose the data in tabular format. The table viewing section provides an option to browse the results in a tabular form in the Viewing mode, with support for full-screen mode. Such a table is scrollable in both directions if needed. It is also possible to change the sorting rules applied to the table.

One report can have multiple tables included, and those can be organized into groups for easier navigation in case of bigger reports.

As with the slide-type pages, the report author can decide to expose additional parameters, which users in the Viewing mode can use to flexibly alter the table definition, e.g., in order to change the country or set of products analyzed.

Each table presented online can be exported to Excel.