Automate your data flow with Spider Connect.

Connect is a tool that pulls information from your spreadsheets, databases, and web services into Scoreboard or QuickScore. Unlike other Export, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools, Connect is fully web-based and can be securely deployed inside or outside your firewall. It's scheduleable, flexible, and above all, easy to use.

Screenshots

The home screen is the first thing you see after logging into Spider Connect. It shows you all of the data sources and scheduled imports. Based on color, you can see at a glance if there are problems with anything. To create a new import, click on the "Create New" button.

In this series of screenshots we'll take you through the creation a new scheduled import. The process has five steps, each represented by a bubble. The light gray bubbles are disabled, so the only thing we can click on is the "Basic Information" bubble.

This screen is relatively simple. You have to give the scheduled import a name and tell Connect which data source to use.

Once the basic information is saved, its bubble lights up and two more bubbles become enabled. One bubble is for pulling in data from the source, and the other bubble is for choosing which metrics you'll be sending the data to.

In this example we're pulling information from a database, so you (or a database administrator) will write a SQL query. The three required pieces of information are a unique ID, a metric value, and a date. A name field is optional. Just drag and drop the yellow boxes to let Connect know which columns go with each data field.

The next step is to choose which metrics we'll be sending data to. Connect allows you to populate as many metrics as you like with a single scheduled query.

Now that we have selected our source data and destination metrics, it's time to tell Connect how to map the two together.

The left side contains all of the unique IDs from the source query, and the right side contains the destination metrics we selected. To map one to the other, just drag and drop.

We can stop here if we want by clicking save in the upper left hand corner, but let's schedule this import to happen on a regular basis.

There are all kinds of ways to schedule an import, and in this example we'll choose every Tuesday at 4:00AM.

And that's it! In five steps we've taken a potentially complex and confusing process and made it simple. Just click save in the upper left corner to return to the Home screen.

We're back to where we started, except that now we see our new scheduled import. The status column isn't green yet because the query won't run until next Tuesday.