Updated: Jul 31, 2020
This month's Consultant’s Corner article, by CDI’s Software Trainer, Kyle Knebel, takes us through the process of creating an organizational document/forms dashboard.
Having a document and/or forms dashboard gives your end-users a quick and easy way to find and access your organizational documents, applications, or forms, in a single and convenient location.
At our organization, CDI, a dashboard was created to fill the need for a single location to store a growing list of form links, in addition to other resources. The dashboard quickly fulfilled the need to provide the links our teams needed to complete their jobs more efficiently.
Let's get started.
To begin, CDI recommends three key considerations when planning and maintaining a Forms dashboard:
1. Dashboard Maintenance – The dashboard is made up of mostly HTML, so it requires updating semi-frequently, so ensuring time for maintenance is an integral part of planning.
2. Ease of Use – Ensuring dashboard ease of use for the end-users. Consider what would be their ideal view as a homepage is essential when organizing the page.
3. On-boarding – For someone new to the organization, the dashboard can be a fantastic resource. It can be overwhelming keeping track of sites and URLs for a new employee.
Using a dashboard provides an excellent way to organize and consolidate links to applications and webpages based on processes used by departments, people, or even categories.
A Forms dashboard does not have any monitoring or reporting, since it is not an actual form, but simply a way of providing links to other Forms, other applications, or other websites.
Make sure to have someone skilled in the use of HTML for website design available to maintain this dashboard.
Building the Dashboard
1. Create a new Business Process in the Laserfiche Forms system.
a. Open Forms at the URL: http://{servername}/forms, where {servername} equals your Laserfiche Forms server.
b. Login with a user account with Business Process Admin rights so that you can create a new business process which contains the single dashboard form.
c. Once logged in, navigate to the Manage tab in Laserfiche Forms
d. Press the New Process green button and choose Blank Process.
e. Name the new Process Dashboard (or anything you feel is appropriate).
2. Creating the new dashboard Form
As soon as you press Create to create the new process, the Designer page appears.
a. On the left side, click on Create New Form.
b. Name the Form and click Create.
c. Click on the Form Title bar and then click Edit. Give the form a title, or you can choose not to show a title at all by unchecking the Show form title checkbox.