We're in the process of implementing Webfocus here at my University. We haven't had any centralized reporting in the past, so we are starting at square one.

I'm wondering what sorts of things people have found to be the most requested/useful as starting points when people log in to their dashboards? I poked around the forum here, but didn't really see anything related to this.

Obviously I'd like to hear from any schools using WebFOCUS, but any responses will be helpful. A business vs. education difference might exist, but I have a feeling that there will be some basic types of reports that would apply, or would have an equivalent in the .edu world.

Also, any links, etc. that people found useful when developing would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Here's a dashboard I developed for a financial institution:

It probably doesn't relate to an educational institution...

Francis, thanks for the screenshot! Even though it's for a financial institution, it's helpful. We don't have sales reps and such, but I can see where people might like counts of new admits and which colleges they are in, etc. Seeing how people are implementing things visually will also be agreat help to our developers here.

Thanks again!

At our university campus, our initial target for the BI Dashboard is to push parameteritzed reports into the hands of various departmental users. These are reports that were developed when we were on mainframe FOCUS and were run adhoc by the programming staff. We're using a standard of two-column layout, stacked folder blocks with an output block for the launch page and resulting output.

Regards,

Dan Kenny
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Prod: WF 7.1.6 Linux BID/MRE/DataMigrator Test: WF 7.6.1 Linux BID/MRE/DataMigrator

You're not getting snow today???

Geez, I'd hate to live in a cold place like that!

Francis, I really like your dashboard! Was it easy to set up like that? Ours is more along the lines of Dan's.

Regards,
Sean

The biggest complication was changing how the tabs look. I don't know if it has improved (I certainly hope it has) since v5.3.2, but the technique the tabs are built with seems quite antiquated and difficult to modify. Basically, several small transparent gif images are used, with particular pieces of the tab on each of them e.g. top left corner for selected tab, top right corner for unselected tab, etc. I changed these gif file for my own - it wasn't pleasant.

The other stuff - the reports inside each of the quadrants were easy - a combination of WebFOCUS reports and HTML code.

Oh, I think I know what your's looks like.

Can't figure out how to get images in, but we use several different "types" of dashboards. Some are just a collection (using tabs) of HTML launch pages - it looks nicer in the dashboard than MRE. We also have an internal dashboard that has ten tabs, each showing related tabular and graphical statistics that management has deemed necessary/useful for company personal to know. The reports are refreshed once a month. Some of the other dashboards are more complex giving combinations of tabs for launch pages, Domain tree, and static information.

Dan, your situation sounds similar to how things were here - this might be helpful to our developers, so thanks for the info.

Darin, if you have the time or inclination, you can email me any screenshots (my email is in my profile) you may have. They would be greatly appreciated.

Seeing the differences in dashboards is helping to get an idea of what we can do once we get to this point, so thanks to everyone.

The easiest method of embedding images in a forum posting is to go to http://www.tinypic.com/ and upload your image there. It's a free photo sharing service that you don't need to login to or need an account to use. Simply select the image from you computer and upload it. After uploading, the website gives you the necessary code to embed the image in the forum posting. For example my dashboard is:

[IMG]http://i11.tinypic.com/2e4f668.png[/IMG]

Cool Francis !

so here it goes

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