Scheduled and Emailed Dashboards coming soon
Jan 1, 2008So, you may have read
http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/2007/12/12/coming-in-spring-08/
That I'd changed the status of the idea to "coming soon" and it's targeted to Spring'08.
If you are extra-perceptive, then you may also have seen this notice on SalesforceWatch:
http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2007/12/spring-08-pre-r.html
telling you the dates for the Spring pre-release, which is soon, and getting sooner every day.
Think of a system that limits the number of things you can do.
Fun? No! But unfortunately, necessary, unless we want to follow the tragedy of the commons.
It could do a few things:
We'd rejected the first - the load being too unpredictable. We would see everybody running their dashboards all at 9am. Or 5pm. Or some time. Anyway, it would make the service spin out of control like trying to drive a fork lift truck fast backwards. My friend Dave tried that once. That one wheel didn't let him steer fast enough.
The second seems nice, but the only solutions to limit the load involve giving users less than one dashboard each. And then who will decide what gets scheduled? And there's still the same problem - if we gave each user 1/20th of a dashboard, and you have 4000 users, you are probably going to spend the 200 dashboards all at 9am or 5pm, because that's when people wanted the dashboard.
The third is something we couldn't see being very popular. If you are a large global enterprise, there is no real off-hours, and also you might not be able to wait until the evening, or you might be monitoring something outside your time zone, and when they finish is during your day.
Ok, we are pessimists. The usual fix to avoid the commons problem is to divide up the common so a small group can talk amongst themselves and decide who gets what, and make sure people don't go over some limits.
Think about something that does have inbuilt limiters on what you do...
Your DVR is one.
(this is a picture of a Tivo V3 HD, which I don't have, so it might be somebody else's DVR)
(Tivo is a trademark of TiVo Inc )
The DVR can record TV programs, but it has 2 tuners, so it can record 2 at the same time. Most TV programs fit into slots, because it's easier if programs start and finish on hourly (or, for funny shows, 30-minute) boundaries. So you can record 2 programs at the same time, but some start and end at different times. And the DVR can tell you that you can't record Grey's Anatomy because CSI:Little Rock and Oprah are on at the same time. Once it's told you that you can't record all 3, you can change to record the 11am re-run of Oprah, and be able to record all your shows.
So, next time I'll cover the feature in more detail.
http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/2007/12/12/coming-in-spring-08/
That I'd changed the status of the idea to "coming soon" and it's targeted to Spring'08.
If you are extra-perceptive, then you may also have seen this notice on SalesforceWatch:
http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2007/12/spring-08-pre-r.html
telling you the dates for the Spring pre-release, which is soon, and getting sooner every day.
The feature:
This will deliver on the idea:
http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/70864/Schedule_Dashboard_Refresh
as well as half of:
http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/22241/Scheduled_and_Emailed_Reports__Dashboards
which would give it:
5400 votes from 70864
1/2 of the 10233 votes from 22241
a massive 10518½ votes!
What we enable is in two parts - scheduling and emailing. I'll cover the scheduling for now, then go into the emailing in the next post.
The scheduling idea:
Think of a system that limits the number of things you can do.
Fun? No! But unfortunately, necessary, unless we want to follow the tragedy of the commons.
It could do a few things:
- Restrict the number of jobs per customer
- Restrict the total number of jobs per user
- Restrict refreshes to only outside of business hours
We'd rejected the first - the load being too unpredictable. We would see everybody running their dashboards all at 9am. Or 5pm. Or some time. Anyway, it would make the service spin out of control like trying to drive a fork lift truck fast backwards. My friend Dave tried that once. That one wheel didn't let him steer fast enough.
The second seems nice, but the only solutions to limit the load involve giving users less than one dashboard each. And then who will decide what gets scheduled? And there's still the same problem - if we gave each user 1/20th of a dashboard, and you have 4000 users, you are probably going to spend the 200 dashboards all at 9am or 5pm, because that's when people wanted the dashboard.
The third is something we couldn't see being very popular. If you are a large global enterprise, there is no real off-hours, and also you might not be able to wait until the evening, or you might be monitoring something outside your time zone, and when they finish is during your day.
Ok, we are pessimists. The usual fix to avoid the commons problem is to divide up the common so a small group can talk amongst themselves and decide who gets what, and make sure people don't go over some limits.
Scheduling a dashboard
Think about something that does have inbuilt limiters on what you do...
Your DVR is one.
(this is a picture of a Tivo V3 HD, which I don't have, so it might be somebody else's DVR)
The DVR can record TV programs, but it has 2 tuners, so it can record 2 at the same time. Most TV programs fit into slots, because it's easier if programs start and finish on hourly (or, for funny shows, 30-minute) boundaries. So you can record 2 programs at the same time, but some start and end at different times. And the DVR can tell you that you can't record Grey's Anatomy because CSI:Little Rock and Oprah are on at the same time. Once it's told you that you can't record all 3, you can change to record the 11am re-run of Oprah, and be able to record all your shows.
CSI:Little Rock? What has this got to do with Dashboards?
| DVR | Scheduled Dashboards |
| You can schedule when programs are on | You can schedule every hour |
| The number of slots depends on how much you spend for your DVR | The number of dashboards per hour depends on your edition. |
| Some people don't have or want DVR. | Scheduling and email is for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers in Spring'08. |
| You can't record if your slots are full | You can't schedule at that time if the slot is full |
| You might have every hour of every day full, so you can't record anything. You have to go delete some scheduled programs | You might have every hour slot full with dashboards, and might not be able to schedule anything more. You need to delete some scheduled refreshes. |
So, next time I'll cover the feature in more detail.
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