Great visualization of which chart to choose.

This image – apparently copyrighted by A. Abela (thank you very much, by the way) – is a great starting point for deciding which chart to choose. Of course, OBIEE currently doesn’t support some of them (such as Variable width column chart) – but I think it’s a very good illustration on various chart types. The chart is available here:
Chart

Also, please check this presentation with some og the AJAX/HTML 5 chart examples – Cool charts – link here
Those are small things – but they could get a lot of brownie points for developers – they would make OBIEE look hip and modern. I really loved the interactive bouncing charts. Not terribly original – but they do create a better experience. Think about users!

I think that the future hold tighter web integration (xml / ajax) for BI systems as well as some great UI. Just look at Iphone – their UI was one of the major reasons for their success. I noticed the trend that many products get that slick look (salesforce, qlickview) – and I hope OBIEE 11G isn’t far behind. I’ve not had a chance to look at it hand-on (just screenshots from presentations) – but again – I hope that product managers looks closely into user experience. The latest version isn’t bad at all – but it’s not far away from distant siebel analytics’s screen/layout. I hope developers would get the facility to customize front-end more liberaly (right now – it involves a lot of xml hacking if you go beyond some CSS stylesheets).

Best wishes.