New Dashboard Domain Tree Coming in Release 7.6.1!

Information Builders is introducing several significant enhancements to the Dashboard Domain Tree in 7.6.1. The new tree shows all of the domains a user is authorized for and eliminates the current drop-down/submit button paradigm.

Unlike the old Domain Tree, context menus are only enabled for right-click in the new tree. Dashboard customers upgrading from previous releases are advised that user preferences (if any) for context menu selection (e.g., left-click, right-click, and hover) will not be respected by the new tree. It will be possible for customers to configure the old Domain Tree behavior if necessary; however both the old and new behavior cannot exist simultaneously.

Give us your feedback!
Take a look at a comparison of the old and new trees and post your comments on this initiative here in this forum topic.


Sincerely,
Gilbert Rodriguez
The WebFOCUS Product Implementation Team

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kathleen Butler,

Good Work

Failing to click submit is one of the bugbears of support.

I vote YES!

unless you can change the actual wording.. eg 'domain tree', 'standard reports', unless you can choose to not show standard reports at all, unless you can completely make it work for our enterprises, i can't see anything to write home about.

The adoption of a tree structure instead of the combo box is, on the surface, a good one. However, when you have many domains to produce the granularity required for controlling report access, there could be a problem when the user wants to have the standard reports (etc.) open for many domains and would have to constantly scroll up and down to see other domains contents. Ok, this can somewhat overcome by careful consideration of working practice by the end user - like when does that happen? Also by careful design of Domains and groups but that would require rationalisation each time a new Domain is added. From this perspective I would prefer to have the previous method remain (with the NFR I put in for the onchange event for the Domain change, negating the need to click on "submit", thus improving the end user experience) as I think that this would better suit many users working processes.

You could argue that the tree structure is no different to the user accessing many different folders via windowse explorer and that the users should be happy with doing that, my counter would be that the BID is a different experience and existing users will not want that change (do they ever?). For brand new users - I think that they will get used to it - that's what new users do.

As for the loss of user preferences upon upgrade, I can only say that this is not good, as end users will, again, not understand why they are losing them. They will not want to have to go through all their customising again and will only serve to provide an initial alienation to the upgrade during testing.

Removal of standard report and reporting object creation? Why? Is this to allow an "under the covers" change that will affect structure? I need to know more on this.

My tuppence worth ........

T

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Tony A,

I like the new tree much better!

The new 'Tree' is certainly a good idea. Occasional DB users at our site always forget to hit the 'Submit' button and send issue tickets to IT.

And Tony has a great point (as always) too. Having an onChange event will be pretty slick and effecient when you have a long Domain list.

Sandeep Mamidenna.

Unfortunately, what LOOKS like a good idea may not actually be what's it's cracked up to be.

When we were presented with the old tree, most of us probably thought "what a good idea", until we started using it.

We'll have to iron out the idiosyncrasies of the new tree just like we did with the old tree.

I don't have access to 7.6, but can we designate a report to be "Run Deferred" only?

My intial reaction is it would be easier to use than the prior interface. However, I agree with Susanna. If this is nothing more that just a face lift with the same restrictions on being able to easily rename and/or hide parts of the domain tree then not sure its a big step forward. If this new design will help faciliate finer grained customization/flexability in future service packs then I am all for it.

The Standard Report and Reporting Objects creation from Dashboard is a capability that we will make available in a future release. Currently, this is created from the MR Applet. One of the goals is to ultimately have users with Administrator and Developer privileges create reports and reporting objects from Dashboard. In addition, the capability to designate a report to be "Run Deferred" only is one of many MR Applet capability that we would like to implement. The new domain tree will put us in a position to implement these in a future release. Stay tuned ...