Future Point Systems recently released new versions of its Starlight Visual Information System (VIS) and Starlight XML Engineering Environment (XEE). Ben Sommers, the vice president of sales and marketing for Future Point Systems, says the focus of this release was ease of use, so the company made overall improvements to the product’s workflow, especially when it came to importing data into the system for analysis. According to Future Point Systems, "In Starlight 4.1.1, we have made tremendous strides to natively support most common data types and to greatly simplify the process of importing data directly into the Starlight application. For example, Starlight 4.1.1 now supports one-step import of PDF documents, along with Microsoft Office documents, including Excel, Power Point and Word." Starlight 4.1.1 even offers drag and drop functionality, which helps reduce the time it takes users to set up analyses.
Another key feature in this release is one-click web reporting, which you can use to share information with many users in multiple formats. You can use Starlight VIS 4.1.1’s proprietary data visualization tools to analyze data and then export the data via the web with one click. This product even comes with its own web dashboard, which lets you do "dynamic reporting of values, metadata, charts, graphs, and other visuals," according to Future Point Systems. And this version of Starlight integrates with Google Earth, making it easy to analyze data from a geospatial angle.
In addition to one-step data importing and one-click reporting, this version of Starlight VIS gives you the option to run the product by itself or connect it to a Workgroup Server. This means you no longer have to run a Starlight client, server, and XEE together to perform data visualization tasks. However, you still have the option to run Starlight VIS with Workgroup Server for more advanced functionality.
A great new capability that this version provides is the Starlight Knowledge Manager, which is basically a scratch pad that you can use when doing analyses. You can take notes and make connections during hypothesis testing.
For more information about the Starlight software suite, visit www.futurepointsystems.com.
