BIRST public facing dashboards

Aaron Narayan

Hi Team, 

Question - Is it possible to share BIRST dashboards publicly. I.e. via our company website for customers to use?

Has anyone had this business requirement, and have tried this?

Cheers, 

Joe McHale

Hi @aaron-narayan

In short - yes , there are a few options (note: I am not sure for the prebuilt Infor Analytics content, as that uses licenses from the Infor ERP itself - ie SyteLine/LN/M3)

1) Embedding in an External Web Application

From your description, this is probably the one you're looking for 

You can embed reports and dashboards in other web applications using a single sign-on (SSO) mechanism. This allows your own authentication mechanism to authenticate the user within your application, after which your application requests an authentication token for the user to access embedded Birst reports and dashboards

Usually this is in the form of an HTML Iframe , and we've solved the SSO "user" by creating a service-admin account type of user that is always logged in so the dashboards don't time out 

2) Embedding Birst content in an External Application

This is known as "OEM embedded anayltics" - to whitelabel Birst, and effectively "make it your own" requires an OEM License 

Birst provides a general mechanism for embedding reports and dashboards within web applications. There are specific methods for embedding within the Salesforce cloud applications. It is possible to embed multiple Visualizer reports and Dashboards (from the same space) onto an external web page.

Note: Similar to 1) , the embedded Visualizer reports (via iframe using JavaScript) can respond to external filters applied from the parent content web page and adjust to any re-sizing efforts made by the parent content container. Requires some HTML knowledge..

3) Examples

Optima Energy are a great example of OEM in action (Optima Energy) - unsure if @neil-turton still monitors these forums, but he'd be well placed to talk you through what they've done ... it's pretty awesome! 

I've worked with multiple customers on an Enterprise License (without the OEM element) who themselves have their clients accessing the Birst dashboards. For this, you can leverage URL masking, but you will need users to have some sort of account to be able to login (so that Security kicks in and only shows their data) - this doesn't sound like the "Public" requirement you mention though, so more just for information)

Any questions, just ask!

Thanks, Joe