Using Virtual Ticket Dashboards to Monitor Your Business

This developer blog article was originally published on MetaCommunication’s website in October, 2009 and discusses how to use dashboards in Virtual Ticket to monitor business activities.

The original article is no longer accessible on MetaCommunication’s website, but the text has been preserved below.

I spend a lot of time working one-on-one with customers who use the Workgroups 2010 software suite. Oftentimes this work includes making recommendations on how to set up the system, training customers on its use, and even putting together custom solutions specific to their business. Throughout the process of working with customers I learn a lot in respect to what they want to get out of system, and often find them asking, “How can I best use Workgroups 2010 to manage and monitor my business?”

One of the best ways I’ve found for effectively monitoring a project or business with Workgroups 2010 is through the use of dashboards created in Virtual Ticket.

A Virtual Ticket dashboard is a single, at-a-glance view that can display information from all Workgroups 2010 modules (and even third party systems). For example, a dashboard can give:

  • Customer Service Reps a view of the proofs and their status being routed through Approval Manager
  • Creative or Production Operators a view of past due, due today, and upcoming assignments scheduled with Advanced Workflow Scheduling (AWS)
  • Traffic Managers a view of scheduled jobs, their percentage of completion, and milestones in danger of being missed
  • Production Managers a view of the open jobs, their status, and the time/materials tracked through Job Manager
  • Accounting a view of the jobs ready to be billed along with invoices generated to date for the current month

This list goes on, and your imagination is the only real limitation to what you can incorporate into a Virtual Ticket dashboard.

Creating Virtual Ticket dashboards like the examples discussed above is easy. In fact, the first example (viewing a list of proofs from Approval Manager) is available on the Developer Center already as a Ticket called TS18274 - Dashboard Ticket - Approval Manager Proof Statuses.

Dashboards combine many elements available to you already here on the Developer Center. At their heart, a dashboard is comprised of one or more grids (TS1050 - Editable Grids Index) that list the data you want to display. This data can easily be filtered to only display information pertaining to the currently logged in user (TS433 - Get the Currently Logged-in User) - effectively presenting only the information targeted to that user. And to facilitate navigation from the dashboard, buttons may be used to “jump” to the source of where the information comes from (TS16930 - Using Buttons to Provide Navigation Between Forms in VT (PS.Go)). For example, a button on the proofs dashboard would “jump” you directly to that proof in Approval Manager or a button on the assignments dashboard would “jump” you directly to that assignment in AWS.

As you explore the Virtual Ticket dashboard concept, I’d love to hear what you think. Are there dashboards that you use to monitor your business? What kind of disparate information are you trying to view simultaneously – and could that be incorporated into a dashboard? Regardless of your answer, I’m confident that a Virtual Ticket dashboard could give you the information you need in one, consolidated view.

Resources

  • TS433 - Get the Currently Logged-in User
  • TS1050 - Editable Grids Index
  • TS16930 - Using Buttons to Provide Navigation Between Forms in VT (PS.Go)
  • TS18274 - Dashboard Ticket - Approval Manager Proof Statuses