Spider Strategies Blog » New CMS Features

Start and Archive Dates in Version 2.3

Kirby Kitson — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 04:15:19 +0000

Have you ever needed objects to appear or disappear for different dates within your scorecards? For example, you may be measuring electric expenses for 2010 but your utilities switched to gas for 2011, and you want your scorecard to reflect that.

The good news is that you can now set start and archive dates in version 2.3. With these options you can make structure change based on the calendar period selected. To set your start and archive dates, just create or edit a scorecard object and expand the advanced options.

Assigning a Group as an Owner or Updater

Kirby Kitson — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:56:32 +0000

Do you need to hold groups accountable for scorecard objects? Version 2.3 allows you to assign groups as an owner or updater. You can even choose to notify each member of the group when it has been assigned or unassigned an owner or updater.

New Chart Writer Options

Kirby Kitson — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:51:34 +0000

Did you know that in version 2.3 you can change the color of your charts? There are options to change the line and bar colors or remove the background color. You can even turn off the shininess and rounded edges to make your charts look more two-dimensional.

Chart background color selected to None, Shininess and rounded corners turned off

Complete Scorecard Structure for Metrics Report

Kirby Kitson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:10:04 +0000

In version 2.3 you now have the option to include the complete scorecard structure in the metrics report. Just click the “edit report” button and select the option to view parents. This is a great new way to view an entire scorecard’s structure in one report!

New PowerPoint Border Guides

Kirby Kitson — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:24:16 +0000

иконописWe’ve got great news if you have ever exported a Dashboard slide to PowerPoint and it was too large for the PowerPoint slide. We have added a dashed line border on the right and bottom edges of the Dashboard to indicate the maximum viewing area within a PowerPoint slide. These dashed lines are just friendly reminders that only show up when dashboards are in editing mode. Any part of your Dashboard that falls outside of the dashed lines may not show up correctly in PowerPoint.

Reports Now on Dashboards

Scott O'Reilly — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:56:51 +0000

Version 2.3 now offers the ability to add reports and charts from the Reports section to dashboards. This can be very helpful to see things like all of your red metrics, or just the metrics that are trending downward.

New Dashboard Bubble Types

Kirby Kitson — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:25:54 +0000

We are excited that Version 2.3 offers additional Dashboard bubble links! You can now quickly link to all kinds of things right from your dashboards, including reports, other dashboards, briefing books, strategic initiatives, documents and scorecards. We know all bubbles are not the same, therefore you can change the shape, size, font size and placement of the bubble links too.

Pie charts with separated sections

Matt — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:44:25 +0000

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!

CMS 2.1 beta release

Matt — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:14:02 +0000

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:

Text
Pictures
Scorecard Nodes with configuration options for what they display
Speedometers
Charts
Graphs
and all of that on top of a background image if needed.

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!!!

Search coming to CMS 2.1!

Matt — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:29:12 +0000

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.