This week, a major Fortune 500 company requested we add the capability to separate out sections of our pie charts to highlight important information. Here is an example with 4 sections highlighted this way. We still need to add some graphic polish, but already this looks like a pretty cool feature!
We are pleased to announce the availability of CMS 2.1 beta! As you can see in our blog posts over the past few weeks, CMS 2.1 graphics boast quite a bit more polish than CMS 2.0 graphics. The most exciting thing, though is the new Dashboards module.
Dashboards work just like standard presentation software. They allow you to create resizable objects called WOBs™ that are:
WOBs™ are a wonderful, fluid, configurable AND exportable set of objects that offer our customers a major method for creating powerful information displays that can be bound in Briefing Books, set as the login page, exported to MS Office apps as well as embedded instantly into emails sent from the app!
But that is just the beginning. Next we will add the ability to drop in Gannt charts, initiative descriptions, task descriptions and milestone descriptions. Finally in 2.2, you will be able to add a resizeable, positionable object from virtually ANY screen in the app, with pictures and text as needed and an incredible array of guages, graphs and charts.
CMS “Dashboards” are much, much more than the word implies. Sign up for a free trial of CMS today and find out Why WOBs™ are Wonderful!!!
At Spider Strategies, we have a “Research and Development” (R&D) day each week that allows us to pursue projects we find interesting. For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a search feature for CMS 2.1 that will allow you to quickly search through everything in CMS: bookmarks, strategy maps, documents, reports, etc. This will be a handy feature if you’re looking for something and you know its name but aren’t quite sure where it would reside within CMS.
Here is a screenshot of the new search feature in action.
On the road and need to run a few reports? Need to check the latest numbers as you go into the big meeting? Maybe you’re gathering data out in the field and want to update your metrics with the freshest data? In CMS 2.1 you will be able to do all this (and more) from your mobile device!
When you log into CMS 2.1 with your mobile device (iPhone, Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc.) you will automatically see a special version optimized for mobile browsing. You’ll be able to view and update your metric data, view your tasks, and run a variety of graphs, charts, and reports!
Dojo has just accepted code from Spider Strategies into the toolkit that allows dragging and dropping hierarchical data in a tree format “between” places in the structure!
Like the folder tree we’re all familiar with, we get accustomed to dragging and dropping things from one place to another. Many of these structures, like file folders, don’t care about the order of the contents. They can sort by things like size or name, but don’t store the order of data.
For more complex data structures, like those in CMS, the order of the data is an important part of the information. Thanks to the code we sent to Dojo, data in a tree can easily be moved from anywhere to anywhere. Previously, you could only drag and drop things into a location. Now it is possible to position things before or after other items, allowing users to intuitively manage their data.
Possibly one of the most useful aspects of the CMS software is the ability to assign weights to any scorecard node, at any level of the scorecard tree. For any node in this tree, any number of subordinate nodes can play a role in determining the score of their parent. This allows users to emphasize the importance of certain higher priority items over others.
When you have two very important objectives, such as “Produce many widgets” and “Keep cost low”, chances are that the default weight of “1″ (setting each of their weights equally, so 50% for each) would work just fine.
But what happens when you add a new node of lesser importance to the tree?
Of course it’s important to keep the water cooler filled, but the default weight of “1″ means that it is of equal importance to “Produce many widgets” and “Keep cost low”(so 33.3% each). So now we need to alter weights of the nodes so that they are scored more appropriately.
The question now may become “How do I modify the weights of these nodes so that ‘Keep water cooler filled’ is only worth 15% of the overall score for this level of the tree?” One way of accomplishing this would have been to first do some calculations in your head to determine the desired weight for each node. Second you would right click on the first node, change its weight and click save, then do the same actions for all subsequent nodes that you need to change.
Not too difficult when only working with 3 nodes, but what if you have, say, 17 nodes, that’s a lot of calculations, and node editing to do!
Our solution is to allow users to modify all nodes at any level of the tree, simultaneously.
After right clicking on “Keep water cooler filled” and selecting “Edit Weighting”, you will see the above screenshot. All siblings of “Keep water cooler filled” now appear in one single list, allowing you to modify all of their weights at the same time.
One of my favorite features about this screen is the immediate “percentage calculations” that take place while editing weights. For example, if you clicked inside the “Keep water cooler filled” textbox and changed it from “1.0″ to “2″, you’ve just increased the weighting of that node to be double that of the other two nodes. At the moment you press the “2″ key, CMS recalculates the “% of Total Weight” and instantly displays “25%” for the first two nodes, and 50% for “Keep water cooler filled”, clearly not a good weight distribution considering that the water cooler isn’t anywhere near the importance of the other nodes, but thanks to the new Edit Weighting interface this was an easy error to catch!
As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, manually doing calculations and editing weights for only 3 nodes, until you have to do it for a lot of nodes. Then the calculating and editing can become quite tedious.
The introduction of this feature in version 1.6 of CMS is one that we hope will provide users with an even greater appreciation for both the usability of our application, and the focus that we place on providing our customers with cutting-edge solutions to even the most mundane of problems.
I’ve spent the last couple weeks working on a new feature in CMS 1.6 that allows you to create, edit and save reports just like performance charts, documents and other items in the system. This feature can save a ton of time because now reports don’t have to be rewritten if a new user wants to see them or if the dates for the report change.
In the past, the only way to save a copy of a report was to save it to your bookmarks. This worked great for the person who created the report, but it was impossible to share that report with other people on the team without recreating it for each user. Now you can create a report once, and it will be available to everyone on your team under the reports tab.
The other reason reports had to be rewritten was when the time period changed. For example, a monthly report would have to be rewritten every month so that it referenced the correct month. Thanks to the relative date feature Chris described last week, reports can be written so that they always show information for the correct time period.
Below is an example report. I set it up to show me all of the metrics under the Customer perspective for the California Manufacturing Plant. I set the dates to relative so once November rolls around the report will automatically show me the data for the last complete month where I have data, October.
How often do you run a report for a periodic set of data? Most applications allow you to enter a fixed period of data with specific dates to report on. Some will let you say things like “show me the last month’s data”, but even those tend to save the results based on that fixed time span. We understand how frustrating it is to constantly update your settings for a report to get the results that matter today and have done something about it.
Our new interface for time based reports in the upcoming release of Corporate Management Suite will allow users to create and save reports based on fixed dates or relative times. Reports saved with a relative timespan will always show information based on the current time, so a report for last month’s numbers will always show the previous month regardless of when you create the report.
A couple days ago I talked about how we made Corporate Management Suite 1.5 easier to use by moving the Organization and Date selectors to the upper left hand corner. It was a great start, but we didn’t stop there.
An annoyance with the software that we’ve known about for a while is that while everything looked good at normal browser resolutions, things got a little squished when viewed on older computers that run at 800×600. As you can see in the 1.4 screenshot above, the tabs fill up the whole top of the screen, and the date selector overlaps two of the tabs, making them unclickable.
Well no longer! To combat the small browser phenomenon we now check the browser’s width and adjust the tabs accordingly. If there is no room to display all of the tabs we now replace the unused tabs with a single “Change Tabs” button (green arrow). When clicked, a menu drops down, allowing you to to select from the tabs that aren’t displayed.
We know that this feature won’t be used by many of our users, but we think it will certainly be appreciated by those who do need it!
We’re constantly refining the user interface of our Corporate Management Suite software based on feedback from our customers, but the changes in version 1.5 are particularly noteworthy. The first ones I’m going to focus on are the Organization and Calendar Period selectors.
Traditionally, the date selector has been in the upper right hand corner (red arrow). It displays the current period, and when you mouse over it, the calendar period selector slides up. The problem with it being placed in the upper right hand corner is that that’s the last place where people look and it’s easy to lose track of what the date is for the data you’re viewing. Another problem is that by just mousing around the screen you can inadvertently trigger the calendar period selector.
In CMS 1.5, we’ve moved the calendar period display to the upper left hand corner. Joining it is the organization display (purple arrow) that has always felt out of place in its old spot under the tabs. Both are now changed by clicking on “change” links rather than via mouse-overs.
We think that these changes will make the Corporate Management Suite even more intuitive and easy to use, and we think you will too. Stay tuned for more updates about the new functionality in 1.5.
