We have created a Quick Install Guide which covers the six easy steps required to to get going, it can be found here

Installing Sharperlight into a compatible environment with an existing datamodel is normally very quick and it could take as little as 15 to 20 minutes. The delays in installing Sharperlight are invariably due to wait time on getting network and database access, and getting authority to add firewall exceptions.

Sharperlight is used by organisations that already use Cognos, BusinessObjects, Qlik, SQL Server Reporting Services, Tableau, PowerBI and a myriad of other business intelligence tools. This is a good indication of how different it is and how it can work alongside existing business intelligence platforms. However, in answering the question, Sharperlight traditionally competes with Microsoft Excel. When people are looking for a relatively cheap and versatile solution, they are evaluating the time and effort to manipulate data in Excel against an off the shelf solution that can be easily maintained going forward. Rarely does Sharperlight go head to head with the mega software vendors because the huge difference in software price and deployment cost is a clear indication that it is not a comparison of apples with apples.

When Sharperlight has been positioned in competitive bids against one of the other business intelligence vendors, it often gets back to being a question of what the customer is actually looking for. If they want self-service operational reporting and analytics, minimum training and technical support, seamless integration with Microsoft Excel, easy deployment to the web and dashboards; then Sharperlight provides a very cost effective solution. However, direct functional comparison with Sharperlight and other business intelligence platforms will reveal gaps because there are many technologies that Sharperlight avoids because they cannot be maintained without significant hardware and ongoing technical support. For example, Sharperlight is not reliant on OLAP cubes and star schema warehouses, it does not have an enclosing Portal and it does not replicate a spreadsheet grid interface because it uses Microsoft Excel.

Sharperlight is a .NET 4.6.1 application and thus, the rich client and server components will only run on a Microsoft Windows operating system that can install .NET 4.6.1 or later. This means that all Windows operating systems from Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 onwards are viable environments for installing Sharperlight.

The Sharperlight Web Service also deploys are zero footprint HTML4 browser environment for consuming published queries. This browser interface should work on any operating system that has a web browser that supports HTML4. Some of the web content published by the service is in HTML5 and this will require a modern web browser to properly render and interact with the content. For example, the Dashboard Pages in Sharperlight use HTML5 and the default charting engine renders charts in HTML5; for browsers that do not support HTML5 it also has a Flash charting engine.

The Sharperlight Excel Add-in is a C++ .NET library, with its own ribbon and it uses custom task panes. This means that the Sharperlight Add-in is compatible with Microsoft Excel 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and client version of 365.

Both 32bit and 64bit versions are supported.

Sharperlight uses a Microsoft SQL Server 2007 or higher database to store user details, licensing, global settings and the published queries for the web service. This System Database is a fundamental requirement for using Sharperlight and all the installs at a client site should be using the same centralised System Database. For solutions and customers who are reliant on other database platforms like Oracle,MS SQL Server, SAP HANA, DB2, SQLite, Teradata, PostgreSQL, Access, Excel, CSV or MySQL; they still need a Microsoft SQL Server database engine to host the System Database. In these non-Microsoft environments they can use SQL Server Express which is a freely available entry level database engine from Microsoft.

There are several levels of data security available in Sharperlight. Within the datamodel the context of a user login can enforce row level security and conditionally display only the query objects (tables) they can access. Table level security is also available when configuring the user and user groups in the Sharperlight application. These restrictions will apply to any query on runtime and within the Web Channel, individual published queries can be secured to selected user groups.

The datamodels deployed with Sharperlight fall into two main categories. There are Master or

Distributed datamodels which are built for vertical solutions and there are Custom datamodels which, as the name suggests, can be custom reporting layers specific to a customers needs.

Master datamodels are password protected and cannot be opened and modified directly. However, they can be enhanced with additional tables and business logic with the creation of an Extension datamodel. An Extension is good for adding lots of query objects and functionality but it can be overkill for just a few little enhancements. For small point solutions the Query Builder has the concept of Custom Tables, Custom Fields and Custom Joins. These custom elements can be added to any datamodel and they are maintained separately and they will be maintained if the parent datamodel is updated.

Custom datamodels are created and maintained using the datamodelling Studio which is installed with every installation of Sharperlight.

The introductory training course for Sharperlight takes about six hours to cover all the topics and it leaves the audience with sufficient knowledge to formulate their own queries, and use the Excel Add- in and deploy queries to the web service. It is a testament to the common user interfaces and simple concepts that after the training, end-users regularly start building their own reporting content and share it amongst their colleagues.

Sharperlight is particularly successful in industries where there is a high turnover of staff and there are many customers who consistently use Sharperlight with little or no training, and they are still achieving a business benefit. Obviously not the preferred situation to achieve the full benefit of the solution but it shows why Sharperlight is so successful in line of business operations.

Licensing is focused around the connection to a datamodel and it does not relate to the presentation layer or the query interface. Therefore, Sharperlight could be installed on thousands of computers and the licensing only kicks in when a user logs into Sharperlight and attempts to create or refresh a datamodel query.

Master datamodels have connection licenses that can only be used with the nominated Master datamodel. Custom datamodels use a custom license pool, where multiple Custom datamodels can share the available license count. There is also an Application license that can share a pool of licenses across both Master and Custom datamodels at the same time. The author of a datamodel decides on which licensing model they want to adhere too.

“There are several presentation layers that end-users can access to consume Sharperlight content, however the two most popular interfaces are using the Excel Add-in and using the Web Channel. In this type of mixed environment where there is a rich desktop client and a zero footprint browser interface, everyone is still connecting to the same Sharperlight Web Service and this Service is hosted on a computer that has connections back to the source databases.”

“The Sharperlight Web Channel can output tables in various file formats that can then be imported into many common spreadsheet applications and the Web Service provides RSS feeds that can be imported and linked too. However, the close integration that Sharperlight has with Microsoft Excel is not possible with other spreadsheeting tools like OpenOffice or Calc. Excel supports .NET libraries and it has an open object model that Sharperlight can easily interact with, these are lacking in many other spreadsheet applications.”

“Sharperlight uses .NET code and Microsoft has never released a .NET runtime for Apple appliances. So the rich client and server components cannot be installed on an appliance running Mac OS X or IOS, however the Safari browser on a Mac or an iPad can be used with the Sharperlight Web Channel.”

“The web content published by the Sharperlight Web Service uses industry standard HTML4, HTML5 and
Javascript. Rather than committing to a massive testing regime of web browsers and versions therein, Sharperlight follows the industry standards and attempts to use a code base that is generally applicable and not tied to a specific selection of browsers. However, when new functionality is added in the web or regression testing is run, the web browsers used in the quality assurance include Edge, Chrome and Safari.”

“Sharperlight is firmly focused on empowering the end-user audience and giving them the power to maintain their own query and analysis content. With this this type of paradigm there is no heavy need for ongoing technical skills and overhead.”

“Many organisations have already invested time and resources in SQL queries that they would like to continue using. Sharperlight can takes these SQL queries and encapsulate them into a Custom Tables. This technique integrates the security and control into the datamodel layer and these Custom Tables become easily accessible thoughout the Sharperlight presentation layer.”

“Sharperlight is designed to give end-users easy access to targeted information from an application database and it allows seamless drill to the details. The product leads end-users down the path of querying just what they need and not attempting to load the world into a spreadsheet. These targeted queries are akin to taking slices of the ocean, the ocean may be very deep but with Sharperlight the focus is on relevance and not attempting to query from the surface to the ocean depths. This focus means that hundreds, if not thousands of consumers can access a production database and the query load is still insignificant.
It is fair to say that Sharperlight also benefits from modern database engines and the power of modern computers. Technology has greatly improved the query potential of a real time query engine.”

“The Datamodel concept and the Sharperlight Query Engine allows people to access complex production systems and report in real time. However, some systems are continuously being updated and some business decisions need reference to current and historical information. To overcome this challenge, Sharperlight has the ability to create Materialised Queries which are refreshable snapshots of production information. Anything that can be queried, can be materialised into a physical table for future reference.”

“Most Sharperlights sites use an ADO.NET connection to a database and they then use this connection to execute queries. The Sharperlight Query Engine uses the structure in the datamodel to formulate queries in the SQL query language and it sends these queries to the database and it returns the results into the presentation layer. Non-database data sources can be integrated into a datamodel using .NET code and libraries. However, this will required technical skills and knowledge.”

“A straightforward datamodel needs an ADO.NET provider to connect to a data source. This data”
“source may not be a relational database, it might be a file structure or web service but provided the ADO.NET provider accepts ANSI SQL then a datamodel is possible. Most popular relational databases have their own data provider and the Sharperlight Studio has connection templates for many of these. For example, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, SQL Anywhere and SQLite. If the connection template does not exist in the Studio, new templates can be added and configured to the source database.”

“The Sharperlight architecture channels the user audience to a simple interface for accessing query objects. The end-user can be oblivious to data relationships and business logic. The datamodel is the unified data interface and if people what to cut out to code or introduce complex query structures, they can use the Studio or to a lesser extend add Custom Tables, Fields and Joins.”

“The Sharperlight Query Engine is focused on dynamically querying relational databases and presenting information in summarised slices. It does not use OLAP technology internal y and in may cases, Sharperlight can negate the need for creating and maintaining OLAP cubes.”

“For most people they see Sharperlight empowering them with tools to create and maintain their own
reporting content. There is a much bigger potential around Sharperlight because datamodels can be used to package and deploy applications. The web servic can be use as an integration point and the writeback capability opens up many more opportunities.”