So I talked in the last post about the Scheduler. Now I'd like to run you through the feature. You'll be able to get a lot more detail when the Admin Preview is released, when pre-release is available, and in the documentation on the Admin Preview, which, unlike this blog, is in all the languages we support, and written by somebody who doesn't pepper his prose with inane pop culture references, or talking about people you don't know.

New features

New features are one of the benefits of multi-tenancy. We build it, turn it on, everybody gets it. Of course, given that everybody gets it, we have to restrict access to it, to make sure it isn't overloaded. I talked about that in the last feature post: Scheduled and Emailed Dashboards coming soon

This new feature

Scheduled and Emailed dashboards is designed to let a user set up a dashboard's data to be refreshed every day (or less) and then (optionally) send out the new snapshot of the dashboard as an email.

Cloning a dashboard won't clone the scheduling and emailing - because the schedule might not be available. Also, when you install a package from the AppExchange, there will be no schedule - again, the schedule might not be available.

You can schedule personal dashboards, if you have the right (the permission on your profile). You can only send it to yourself though... otherwise, other people might see what they are not supposed to.

New permission

There is a new profile permission to control if a user can schedule. For instance, you can set up departmental managers to schedule initially, until most of the scheduled slots are full. Then start to examine which dashboards are scheduled, and whether they need to be, and whether they are time-sensitive.

Users who can schedule cannot delete schedules (because they could well belong to other people), and since we don't have CRUD on the jobs, only people with "Modify All Data" can go around deleting other people's jobs.

Scheduling a dashboard to refresh

To schedule a dashboard to refresh, it's a lot like asking a dashboard to refresh now:

Then just ask for a schedule, like every weekday:

And ask for a time:

By default, we'll select the earliest times available. In this case, midnight, 1am and 2am have been taken, so we're showing 3am as first available time, and chosen it. You can change the selection, of course.

Of course, if you've been busy, there might not be any times...

What it looks like when many slots are used

When every single time slot is used, you can see something else:

This means that it's time to look at the management interface and see which ones you no longer use.

Emailing

We can also email the output of the dashboard. Then you won't have to login to see it when it's refreshed.

You get a choice of recipients:

If you choose "Me", then you'll be the only one to get the mail. "Me" is enabled by default, because we think:

1. you probably want to know that it did refresh
2. if you are the owner of the dashboard, you probably care about the data
3. if you are the admin of a smaller company, you also want to see that your user's data is right

You can choose others, and it will let you choose users who can see the dashboard - in fact, the list on the left is taken from the list you set up when deciding who could see the folder that the dashboard is saved in:

The dashboard you receive

So then you are sitting around, and get the email. What does that look like:

Well, it looks pretty much like the view on the screen (with one big exception see below). There is no branding on this email - we've had a lot of feedback that if we send emails out, they should either have controllable branding or no branding. For now, I'm going with "No branding" unless I get an Idea on IdeaExchange asking for templating.

The management view

In the 1980's there used to be a comedy duo on UK TV called "Hale and Pace" - if you've seen the last episode of "Extras", you'll have seen them (much older) trying to get into The Ivy restaurant in London, and being refused. They were "The Management":

You can see them in action at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1979to2006/filmpage_fireworks.htm

Don't worry if you think you are missing the joke, they weren't that funny at the time. And this is a public information film, so it's probably less amusing.

But there is a screen to manage the set of scheduled items:

And the answer to one of your questions is "No, there aren't any other types of schedule jobs for just now". Dashboards are the only scheduled type of job you can have in Spring'08.

Why I hate Lotus Notes pt 6

I'm old. Old enough to remember cc:Mail. cc:Mail was kind of cool, in the way that Model T Fords were probably cool, and the first dishwashers were probably cool. I'm not old enough to remember those. cc:Mail worked, and it wasn't too weird, or clunky. The client had icons, and windows, rather than pressing r to mark the mail as read, and you could click and see things and send mail. And it could be run by a sysadmin who only knew about Novell, and had a password of "racer2".
Then came Exchange for me, and Outlook as the UI, and I was happier. It worked the way the rest of the Windows computer did. But for many people, upgrading from cc:Mail meant Lotus Notes. Notes was a database, offline synchronization, a development environment, a cross-platform tool, scripting, different databases, mailboxes, all kinds of things. Some IT consultants even argued you could have Exchange for mail and Notes for your knowledge base and some applications, and synchronizing and moving data. I had to use Notes once when I was a data warehousing application consultant at a client site. As much as I disliked Notes as an QA engineer, and a Product Manager, when I was a user, I disliked it more.
What Notes isn't is new and clever. It is not "teh new hotness" as they say on teh internets. And so it doesn't know what to do with a .png file. PNG files are an image format. Like GIF, or JPEG. Unlike GIF, it wasn't mired in a legal morass for years. Unlike JPEG, it's lossless, so computer graphics of graphs look clean and precise. We use PNG for our graphs, because it's small, all browsers support it, and it makes the graphs look clean.
Notes doesn't read PNG files. Not even the new V8 Notes. So, no graphs for you.

This isn't a personal grudge that I don't want to make it work. We have Notes to test it, and we can make it work by sending jpeg files (so the graphs look fuzzy) or sending BMP files, which makes each email over 2MB, which is probably not acceptable.

BTW, This post was build differently than all the other ones. Tell me if you could not see the images before, and can see them now, or vice-versa.