Our "Spider Bytes" blog is an informal mix of whatever is on our minds. We write about all kinds of things, ranging from new product features for our customers to technical tips for other software developers.

I work on dashboards all day every day, so it’s easy for me to lose track of just how cool they are. When Scott sent me these examples, I was floored!

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’re busy working on all kinds of great new WOBs to include in your dashboards, and here’s a preview of something that is coming in the next couple of months.  The new linear gauges will be able to be displayed vertically or horizontally, in both slider and bullet formats.

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!!!

As you can probably guess from previous posts, all of the charts and graphs are getting a complete rework in CMS 2.1.  Speedometers are no exception!  Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

With CMS 2.1 right around the corner, we’ve been working hard to make sure everything in the app looks better than ever. One of our most recent tweaks is that we’ve changed the way we’re drawing pie charts. Here’s how they looked before:

And here’s how they look now:

Not only are they easier to read, but I think they look quite a bit better as well.

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!

Two weeks ago I posted about how I spiced up the graphs in CMS.  Well, now it’s time for the gantt charts.  This is what they looked like before:

And this is what they look like now:

Quite an improvement if you ask me!  Although things do look more attractive with the 3d shading, I think the real improvements are in readability.  The partially complete tasks now make more sense, and the grouping categories don’t get in the way.  Keep an eye out for this new functionality in CMS 2.0 soon!

Nothing is polished yet, but here’s a sneak peek of where we’re going with dashboards in CMS 2.1.