Concept: How to "publish" Dashboards, Request Queues, Documents, and more in Workfront

[William--]

I mentioned a concept last week (in a separate thread about force-adding Favorites to users via the API) that we've adopted, referred to as "Publishing," and that I would speak to it in more detail in a separate post.

Publishing is something we do to reduce our reliance on custom Layout Templates. (We use just one Layout Template for all of our 5,000 users). In our LT, we've added a custom dashboard to our Reporting landing page, and made it the first tab. This way, when a user clicks on Reporting in global nav, the first thing they see is our custom dashboard (titled "Dashboard Central).

Dashboard Central is a dashboard object, containing 3 dashboard reports in 3 vertical columns.

When we invest the time and energy into creating dashboards, we want to make them easily accessible and highly visible, so they're less likely to be forgotten. Once something is ready for prime time, we take two steps to publish it:

1. We add a keyword to its description. The 3 dashboard reports that comprise Dashboard Central are each filtering off just one attribute: "Does the dashboard description contain the keyword that this particular dashboard report is looking for?" This is how we control in which column the shortcut to the published dashboard will appear.
2. We share the published dashboard with its relevant audience. Because Dashboard Central is visible system-wide, everyone can see it. By tailoring the sharing settings for each published dashboard, we ensure everyone viewing Dashboard Central will be served shortcuts to all the dashboards that are relevant to them, and none of the dashboards that aren't. (Except for poor admins, we see them all...)

We find this approach is better than directing users to the native Reporting landing page to find dashboards, because A) they simply don't know the difference between dashboards and reports, so end up looking in the wrong tab altogether and B) it eliminates the noise that is introduced when a user is looking at a list of ALL dashboards.

We've taken this concept and applied it all our global nav links (except Home, of course). When a user clicks on Project, Reporting, or Requests, they are served up a custom dashboard where we publish the objects that they are most likely searching for in a custom-designed dashboard that works for any user, as opposed to trying to make everyone understand the detail and nuance of navigating every different section of Workfront.

We've applied some CSS styling to our views, but that is more cosmetic and not a strict requirement for the functionality of publishing. If anything, I suggest learning how to share columns (lots of posts here on how to do that) so you can list details in a vertical layout instead of horizontal layout, as this approach doesn't work well with more than one or two columns max.

I hope this sparks some ideas out there about how admins can more dynamically serve up records that are most relevant to the viewer with less administrative overhead.

[William--]

@Randy Roberts‚ @Kevin Quosig‚ forgot to tag you on this, sorry!

[SamanthaIsin]

This is AWESOME. Thanks for sharing!