A Historical Odyssey: The Early Days of QlikView Publisher

[hic]

With QlikView 4 and QlikView 5 we reached a much larger audience than before. We now had large enterprise customers that had demands on the product that we didn’t quite satisfactory fulfill: The demands were around Security, Distribution and Workflow.

As a result, one large Swedish customer developed their own system to administrate QlikView: They developed software that used the QlikView COM Automation interface to update and distribute QlikView documents. They showed it to us and we were impressed – so impressed that we bought the code to develop it further.

As a result, we could in 2001 release the QlikView Administrator.

The Administrator had three basic components:

• The Factory – which later became The Distribution service
• The User Access Portal – which later became The Access Point
• The Administration Panel – which later became The Management Console

The Factory’s tasks were to update the QlikView documents and distribute them in a secure way. On the portal, the users could either download the documents for off-line use or connect to the documents using QlikWeb – which was the name of our server at the time. Finally, the administration panel was used to set the rules for how and when the updates should be made and to whom the documents should be distributed.

The Administrator was the basic workflow tool that our enterprise customers demanded. It contained tasks, scheduling, data reduction, document categorization, document distribution and it also set the user rights per document. So it covered all the basic needs.

The administration panel for Administrator version 1

The name was not quite good, so we renamed it “QlikView Publisher”. We also improved the UI and the functionality and when we released version 2 a few years later, it was much richer in features and much more usable.

The administration panel for Publisher version 2

Initially, it was developed in Visual basic 6, but we soon were looking for a more modern development tool and today it is developed in C#.

The version numbers were not in sync with QlikView until QlikView 8. Before that, the Publisher had its own numbering. For QlikView 9 the QlikView Server and the QlikView Publisher were completely merged, with a common management console and a common installation. This also means that some of the original Publisher features became available also without a Publisher license, e.g. the reload of a document.

Although very much has changed since the first Publisher version, the basic concepts for the Publisher remain the same: Security, Distribution and Workflow.

Today, the Publisher is a mature workflow tool that allows our customers to manage the distribution of information both to off-line and on-line users. It can connect to a large number of directory services; it can be integrated with almost any authentication system and it can use either Windows integrated authorization or the QlikView internal authorization. It can take a master document, refresh it, reduce it so that the user only gets its own data and finally distribute it in any way the administrator wants it. It is an absolute necessity for a company with enterprise demands on security and data governance.

HIC