Making pervasive BI possible via dashboard improvements: Edit and Delete Warning Message

By Bruno Callea

We know what you want.

When it comes down to it, we all just want the same thing. Happiness? Wealth? Fame? No.

Highly effective Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards, which make pervasive BI deployments possible – that’s what!

Research Director for BI, analytics and Performance Management at Gartner, Daniel Yuen, penned a recent article for forbes.com – Mobility and Real-Time Dashboards Will Make Business Intelligence More Pervasive in 2013. Yuen emphasized the continuing importance of modern dashboards, and the role they play, for delivering actionable information to an increasing number of recipients. Like Yuen and Gartner, we know that the key to BI success is widespread deployment – coupled with high user adoption, of course!

But, we also knew that as more people use the insights generated by BI content to make better decisions, we need to improve the way that content is managed. And, because dashboards are a fundamental method for communicating that content to end-users, the way in which they’re managed has to be improved to suit the rapidly changing business-user-oriented BI landscape.

The Development Team at Yellowfin have been working around the clock to come up with new and exciting features that do exactly that.

Ever been in a situation where you wanted to edit or delete a Dashboard Tab, but were unsure how it would impact other users sharing the tab? We know we have; so we thought we’d make your life just that little bit easier still.

Introducing the Edit and Delete Warning Message for the Dashboard. This feature is now available in the latest Release Build 6.3.

Editing a Dashboard Tab

When editing a Dashboard Tab, a popup message will automatically notify you if anyone else is using that specific tab. The Warning Message details all other users sharing the Dashboard Tab, and includes a prompt to continue or cancel. This way, you’ll always know who will be impacted, should you choose to make any changes.

Deleting a Dashboard Tab

When deleting a Dashboard Tab, the ‘delete’ button is now highlighted in red, drawing your attention to the potential impact. Deleting a Dashboard Tab from your instance will result in its removal from all other users sharing the tab.

Once you’ve selected to delete a Dashboard Tab – as with the new editing process for Dashboard Tabs –a popup message will be displayed, alerting you of any other users sharing the tab. Like the Edit Warning Message popup, you’ll be able to know which individuals will be impacted by any changes.

When will these new dashboard Warning Messages appear?

These Warning Messages will only appear if the Dashboard Tab is shared with other users. If not shared, you’ll be able to edit a Dashboard Tab without the Warning Message being displayed. Similarly, when deleting a Dashboard Tab, which has not been shared with other users, a simplified popup message will be displayed:

What next?

The development team at Yellowfin is working hard to create many more new and exciting features for the next release. So what are these excitement-inducing qualities? I’m afraid it’s a secret I cannot reveal. Yet…