My Favorite v14.6 New Features
A few weeks ago, with the release of SiteCatalyst v14.6, there were a few interface features added that people like me have been requesting for a long time. While there were many new items released, two of the more simple ones can go a long way to making the lives of power users easier. Below is a quick description of these two enhancements and why I like them.
Send Link
Have you ever worked hard to create a beautiful report in SiteCatalyst and wanted to share it with others at your company? To do so, you usually have to save it as a Bookmark or to a Dashboard and then share that Bookmark or Dashboard and then tell users how to find it and add it to their list of Bookmarks or Dashboards. Alternatively, you could send it to them in PDF/Excel/CSV format, but then they cannot manipulate it (change the dates, add different metrics, etc…). Well all of that is a thing of the past now since you can now easily send a link to the exact report you are looking at to one of your peers. The only prerequisite is that they have a log-in to SiteCatalyst and have security access to the report suite and variables used in the report. This is a real time-saver and I think will be useful in driving SiteCatalyst adoption by getting people into the tool to explore vs. always looking at reports sent via e-mail.
To send a link to a report, simply click the new icon found in the toolbar…
…and you can copy this link and send it to people at your organization. I was told that these links would be good for a year which should be plenty of time. The way I am excited to use this feature is in PowerPoint presentations where you can put a screen shot of a report and then make the entire screen shot image a hyperlink to the real report so when you are presenting you can easily dive right into the report without having to fumble around to find different reports when you are short on time and/or in front of executives.
My only complaints/enhancement requests of this new feature are as follows:
- I would like to be able to have this feature for Dashboards as well
- It would be cool if you could e-mail the link to SiteCatalyst users be picking names from an address book since they all exist in the Admin Console anyway. Even better if you could set-up some groups for people who you commonly e-mail
- In the future, it would be interesting if you could send the link to a Publishing List which would show the same report, but for a different report suite to different groups of people (however, this would mean you need to check a box to determine if the link is variable or not like Dashboard reportlets)
Update Dashboard Reportet
The second new feature I love is the ability to update Dashboard reportlets. Using this feature, you can now make changes to a Dashboard reportlet much more easily than in the past. Previously, to update a Dashboard reportlet, you would have to:
- Open the Dashboard
- Launch the reportlet into full view
- Make your changes
- Click to add the new version back to the Dashboard
- Update the reportlet settings
- Wait for the Dashboard to open
- Delete the old version of the reportlet
- Move the new version to the correct space (phew!)
Now you can accomplish the same thing by doing the following:
- Open the Dashboard
- Launch the reportlet into full view
- Make your changes
- Click the new link (shown below) to update the Dashboard reportlet
As you can see, this is much easier and much more intuitive for end-users. In addition, you can even change report suites and view the same reportlet for a different data set and update it and it will be saved back to the Dashboard tied to the new report suite! Very exciting for Omniture guys like me!
Well those are my two favorite enhancements, but I know there were many more made. Let me know if you agree/disagree that these two items are useful or if there are other feature updates that you have found useful or if you have additional suggestions on how these two can be improved (maybe Omniture Product Management will end up reading these!). Thanks!
