Playing TAG with AWS 5¶
This developer blog article was originally published on MetaCommunication’s website in June, 2011 and discusses the ability to tag steps within Virtual Ticket’s Advanced Workflow Scheduling (AWS) system.
The original article is no longer accessible on MetaCommunication’s website, but the text has been preserved below.
The Advanced Workflow Scheduling 5 (AWS) solution in Virtual Ticket recently introduced the ability to “tag” scheduled activities, which effectively allows you to assign a color/highlight to the activity. Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with some customers during a classroom training to review this new feature and we discovered some pretty cool ways this could be used.
Our first exposure to this new “tagging” function was in the AWS schedule form itself; we noticed that you could now “tag” an activity through a dropdown field. “Hmmm...that’s interesting,” we thought. “But where does the ‘tag’ list come from?”
We dug deeper, and found that Tags can now be defined in the AWS Configuration area. In the setup, each Tag can be given a name and identified with a background color. We also found that not only can Tags be applied to activities on a schedule, but they can also be assigned to pre-defined activities in the AWS Configuration area as well. Seeing this really got our minds rolling.
“I bet I could use this for our jobs,” stated one customer. “A ‘job’ for us has different types of activities in its schedule. For example, there’s a ‘Creative’ path, an ‘Editorial’ path, and a ‘Production’ path that every job goes through. If I ‘tag’ each of the activities with a color specific to their path, it would be much easier to visualize on the job schedule itself,” the customer explained.
We pursued this idea by setting up three Tags: “Creative”, “Editorial”, and “Production”. We then proceeded to tag individual activities, such as ‘Design’ (as Creative), ‘Copywriting’ (as Editorial), ‘Graphics’ (as Production), etc. And sure enough, when we then applied these activities to a job schedule, the visual difference was immediate; they showed up color-coded based on the Tag they were assigned which made it much easier to interpret the different paths within the job schedule.
Furthermore, we were able to use the Tags as a filter, another new feature recently added to AWS, to determine which activities were actually displayed. If we wanted to see the full job schedule, we left it as-is; if we only wanted to see the ‘Design’ activities, we used the new Tag filter on the schedule to only see the Design activities. Likewise for Creative, Production, and any other Tag we could have created.
And while this illustrates how just one customer might use Tags, I’m confident this same concept can be applied to many of our AWS customers. Check out the latest tag functionality and let me know what you think and how you might use it. I’d love to hear about it.