I submitted a ticket to Phocas asking how to have a widget appear on multiple dashboards. At this time, widgets have to be manually recreated / you can clone a dashboard… but cloning a dashboard copies over ALL widgets.
Alan Oritz (Phocas Customer Support) suggested that I write up a quick post in the user group to request a “copy widget” feature be added in a future release. The Development Team frequently checks these Product Suggestions to gain some customer insight as to how to best prioritize new features.
This would be very helpful for a project that we are working on right now, too. We created multiple dashboards for different branches to use with external links, but after thinking we were done and rolling them out, we now want to make additions to each dashboard. However, it is time consuming to add the new widget separately to every dashboard. Would be nice to clone from one dashboard to another!
Would this be a simple as cloning the widget from one dashboard to another? Or would you like to be able to update it in one place and it updates on all dashboards?
@will.marriott I think for what we have come across in my team, priority would be ability to simply clone a widget from one dashboard to another. It would be great to see that other functionality added, though.
@will.marriott It would be good to have both options. Although, we would make most use out of being able to copy a widget to a dashboard. I would use the “update a family of widgets” option less often.
It would be helpful to have both options - to choose to update just the one or all of the widgets.
There may be times that I would copy a widget, and then edit it so that it reflects a different location for example. This would require a copy widget feature.
There may also be times where I would want to update a family of widgets; for example, updating from a current fiscal period to a new fiscal period at year end… so in this case having the option to cascade for a family of widgets across multiple dashboards would be helpful.
@ShaneAngel you could also analyse the widget and then switch to chart (if it was a chart) and then use the add to dashboard function. That way you don’t need to create a favourite.
Ability to clone a widget from one dashboard to another. This could be a simple icon or menu on the clone icon to achieve that.
Ability to choose a favourite to display on a dashboard, where updating the favourite would be reflected on the dashboard. This would allow the use of one favourite on many dashboards.
We are hoping to work on dashboard functionality this year and these may be included.
Don’t want to hijack the thread, but being able to subscribe to dashboards would be a great thing too, pretty sure that has been suggested elsewhere. Having our employees see the information in their inbox as oppose to forcing them to go to a link or Phocas itself, would be powerful indeed.
@ShaneAngel that indeed has been logged. It’s being talked about but it’s not currently on the roadmap.
For your employees, why would a static emailed report be powerful? When they view a Phocas dashboard they get the ability to search, filter, change the period, and investigate further where they need to.
Whilst I don’t disagree with you in the slightest, our biggest battle is getting people to look at the reports and dashboards I am creating for them. I can’t imagine my job without Phocas anymore, but most of our staff don’t feel the same way.
I agree in someway with Shane but feel that it depends on what you consider a dashboards use.
Most dashboards are quite large in my experience and are not easily printed, exported, saved and certainly would be too large to drop to excel and email.
However, a carefully constructed dashboard gives you the ability to create what would be a custom report in any ERP system. More structured than a single chart or grid, but not overwhelmingly big.
Essentially I think the main use would be from making a simple A4 formatted report containing a handful of graphs, tables or gauges (think of a simple company overview - current stock level, current sales vs budget, 10 biggest orders yesterday etc as a one page view of yesterdays performance).
I made such a report in SSRS in my last company and while you could access it on the report server, it worked much better delivered to the users inbox as you naturally would open it and read it.
The trouble Phocas will have is how to restrict what dashboard would be email-able and what wouldn’t as too much and it’ll look garbage.
@ShaneAngel Not sure if you have one digital spot where your employees all go every day, but using the external link in a viewer window of some sort could be helpful. For example, we have a sales goal dashboard viewable within our ERP, so it is available to employees in the same program that they use every day. We accomplish that by using external links (not embedded) in a web widget within the ERP system. I have heard great feedback about it! The basic idea of bringing Phocas to the employees, rather than them having to go to it, like what you hope to accomplish with the emails.
@Terry.Fung That is definitely a pretty quick and easy way to accomplish this!
It would still be cool to copy one widget to 10+ dashboards at once, since this workaround only allows you to do one copy at a time. But it definitely works. Thanks!
Has this died on the vine or is there still life? The ‘save as a favorite’ then ‘add to dashboard’ workaround is clumsy and, only works for widgets that are querys. What abouts lists, nested tables, text blocks and URLs? Being able to copy lines and widgets from one dashboard to another would be the ideal solution. @will.marriott@ShaneAngel
The ‘save as a favorite’ then ‘add to dashboard’ workaround is clumsy and, only works for widgets that are querys. What abouts lists, nested tables, text blocks and URLs? Being able to copy lines and widgets from one dashboard to another would be the ideal solution.