No matter what somebody’s role in the workplace is, one of the roles they’re engaged in somehow relates to making executives happy. What’s neat about executives is that they’re easy to please in most cases, and the easiest way to please a lot of them is dashboards. They’re almost the equivalent of shiny things to a small child in some ways. This isn’t to say that executives are like small children…usually The point is that dashboards have a lot of power.

The biggest challenge that I encounter in creating dashboards is usually what to show and what not to show. With a tool like Sentinel at your disposal, and with unlimited possibilities, what’s going to make the executive types smile and nod, and what’s going to make them scratch their heads in confusion? The solution seems to revolve around requirements gathering…kind of. The problem is that with unlimited possibilities, it’s pretty hard to answer the question “What can you show us?”, and even when you initiate, “what can you show us?” is a common answer to “what would you like to see?”.

I’ve decided that for sentinel dashboards, the easiest thing to do is to create a simple array of options. As such, I’m going to start working on a bunch of basic dashboards for Gateway and some other things to make available for download on the user group website. One of the coolest things to do to get ideas or give ideas to others might be as simple as to see what others are doing, and either emulate or expand on them. One of neatest features about sentinel is the export feature. Having a repository of XML files that you can import and examine will make things really easy.

Now off to create my basics….woo-hoo!!!

Countdown to the community site launch - 6 days.