Welcome to the 2013 Winter Holiday Edition of the Chartline Newsletter!

As we near the end of this year, we first want to thank you, our clients, for another successful year adding to Visual Mining’s 16-year history. We credit our success to maintaining and building upon our client relationships, which means we are successful only if you are successful! Let us know how you are doing, what projects you are excited about going into 2014 and how we can help you reach your business goals.
We value your business and hope to hear from you soon!

Happy Holidays from all of us at The Visual Mining Team.

In this issue:

1. The New visualmining.com

In case you haven’t visited visualmining.com lately, we invite you to check out our recently redesigned website with an all new look and new content. Please feel free to explore all the new things to see and don’t forget to download your own evaluation copy of our products!

• Live Demo
  We would like to invite you to take a virtual test drive of our live NetCharts Performance Dashboards (NCPD) demo to see our newly restyled dashboard KPI’s.

• Blog
  Among the new items to explore on our site includes our new blog. This developer driven blog features new content with many different topics including tips and simple tricks to help you build and style your charts and dashboards. Keep coming back for lots more new content that will be added each month.

• Chart Gallery
  We also have a new chart gallery which features all new examples with many different kinds of chart types to demonstrate some of the countless possibilities. We also added new chart type categories such as Alerting Charts and Showcase Charts. The Alerting Charts include different chart types that use alert zones while the Showcase category features chart examples with new and unusual styling approaches to demonstrate the flexibility of our charts.

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2. Our Products

If you are using an older version of our products we invite you to explore the product sections below to read about all the new features waiting for users with current Maintenance & Support Agreements. We recommend upgrading to our most current version to take advantage of all the new features. Remember that you are welcome to download your own free fully functional evaluation copy of any of our products below. Simply click the green Download Now button on any of the product pages.

• NetCharts Performance Dashboards 2.5 (NCPD) is a web-based business intelligence and performance dashboard solution that allows you to easily transform your data into actionable information with no programming or coding required.

• NetCharts Server 7.0 is an enterprise-ready hosting platform that helps development professionals deliver a comprehensive, effective, and intuitive visual presentation layer designed using NetCharts Designer, whether standalone or integrated with other application servers.

• NetCharts Designer 7.0 is a comprehensive development and design studio for creating and implementing reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs that can be used in web-based applications such as those hosted in NetCharts Server.

• NetCharts Pro 7.1 provides a comprehensive chart library to create and deploy interactive charting within Java based applications, web-browsers, and internet-enabled devices.

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3. Customer Case Study

Read more about the Jamaica Ministry of Transport & Works Case Study here.

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4. Chart Spotlight

Using our development studio NetCharts Designer you can easily build an Alert Chart as shown below that shows the negative bar values in red and positive bar values in green.

Here’s how:

• In a BarChart by default the Bars are set to Group, so for this example we will need to set the Bars as Stack instead. This is important because otherwise the bars will not line up with the labels if they remained set as Group.

• In addition to the default single bar set, three additional bar sets will need to be added. Each of these bar sets will be assigned a specific color (red, green etc.) and value.

• To show a text label that displays the value of each individual bar, a BarValueLabels param will need to be set.

• To draw the horizontal center line you will need to add a NoteSet. Using a Note will allow you to define the XY coordinates and the line thickness of the Note’s Line Style.

• To replace the default bottom axis labels, add new text labels by modifying the BarLabels param.

• Finally, four DataSet params are defined with values that are specific to each of the four bars.

For detailed How-To steps please visit our blog post where we will go over each of the steps how you can easily build an Alert chart using a simple Bar as the chart template.

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5. Developers Corner

In this edition we are including tutorial that will help developers to quickly and easily create chart templates. Most people are not aware that NetCharts Designer can be used to create chart templates for NetCharts Pro. A tutorial detailing how to export chart templates for use with NetCharts Pro can be found here.

We also strongly recommend that users with valid M&S agreements log into the Developer’s Portal and review the available solutions for any questions you may have.

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6. Did You Know?

Visual Mining has its own measurement called ChartStones, indicating the response time of generating a chart image using our base rendering engines.

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