Business Dashboards often provide at-a-glance views of KPIs, real-time information, trends and live status relevant to a particular objective or business process.
Dashboards give signs about a business letting the user know something is wrong or something is right. Dashboards typically are limited to show summaries, trends, comparisons, and exceptions. Normally – best practice for a good dashboard will be:
- Simple, communicates easily
- Minimum distractions to avoid confusion
- Supports organized business with meaning and useful data
- Applies human visual perception to visual presentation of information.
HANA Cloud Portal (AKA HCP) provides solid and robust platform to create, develop and maintain your dashboard easily using the easy HANA Cloud Portal site creation and consumption development tools.
Who are we (HANA Cloud Portal DevOps)
HANA Cloud Portal DevOps team is responsible for all end to end development processes, tools, dev and production environment and all systems landscapes.
We are taking the wheels of build, deployment and runtime responsibilities for all aspects. Part of our job is to monitor and provide transparency to all. Therefore we decided to provide this dashboard. Since we have the excellent infrastructure to do it – we easily setup this first release of our business dashboard.
How to create business dashboard using HCP?
Account
The first step of course is to have your account with HCP enabled. The easiest way to experiment it – is having your own free trial account
Site
The first place is to create your own site with the needed page. It can be either private access site or public. To this site you will have to add your own theme and design. There are many great articles in this blogs area you can review and learn how to design your own beautiful and professional site in a sort time.
Content and Widgets
Content and widgets must be discussed with all relevant people who interact with the dashboard. The main goal is to have interesting informative and efficient page.
After that it is highly recommended to consult user experience experts so you can place your content in the best area.
The area is limited so details and design is highly critical.
Develop
I will not talk about technical development info. There are many great articles in this blogs area you can review and learn how to develop in HCP tools.
HCP platform provide easy way to create the content.
- You can create JAVA servlets running on HANA Cloud or any application server that provides API (like JSON / XML) and develop you own open social widgets.
- Create your own HTML content and consume it using HCP URL widgets.
- Consume external reports from external systems.
Adjust to the target running platform
You can run the HTTP final site on a dedicated PC / Laptop / Mini PC but you will have to adjust the design based on the place you want to run it. PC monitors, Plasma / LCD / LED monitors in various sizes will show different view.
Publish (classify to the relevant users) and Run
Publish your dashboard to the users is a critical step. In order to have interest – you will have to find the most central place in your work env. Simply sending a link to all developers might work but will not “enforce” all users to interact this data.
ASK FOR END USERS FEEDBACK. If they find no interest in your dashboard – they won’t care about anything.
That’s it :smile: – we’re done!
HANA Cloud Portal business dashboard
Our dashboard created and design as recommended. After collecting feedback from the users – we are currently working on improvement and enhancement phase.
Location
We placed it in our coffee corner / kitchen 55 inch LED TV. In that way – any user knows “by accident” needed information and also red alerts.
Content
We placed as a start some real information about
- Customer usage (how many trial users we have in live, how many sites are running).
- Systems status and alerts
- Automation cycles status
- Build and automatic tests status
Next steps (WIP):
- Availability status
- Status from the social media (Facebook / LinkedIn / Twitter official pages).
- Trends
- Graphs
- And more…
Some pics
And... location:
Feel free to contact me for any question or follow me @KorenNir. or http://www.linkedin.com/in/nirkoren
- SAP Managed Tags:
