Hi Jan - you bring up a really good question - who should set up and manage the folders?

- Should it be the individual?  This gives the user complete control, but doesn't really help with governance & help users know which reports they should be looking at.

- Should it be the designer(s) controlling a single hierarchy?  This provides better governance, but doesn't give the individual as much control.  

      - If so, should all designers have permissions to manage the single hierarchy (e.g. adding folders & loading and moving reports/dashboards).  Or should only Admins be able to to this?

Thoughts?

Steve

While we are at it.

Would it be possible for the users to organise them for themselves? Like some sort of "favourites".

I would go for a hierarchy + searchable box (with search as you type)

Users work with folders hierarchies every day + searching files if they cannot find them

Folders are probably better at reducing the perception of clutter, which sounds like one of the goals of this idea. Tags are definitely more powerful and flexible, but I suspect the primary issue is the feeling of disorganization, which tags may not solve.

Hi Steve,

I think that both ideas are viable but I personally like the idea of folders better. I think that in a lot of cases reports tend to be structured in more of a natural hierarchy such as Finance -> Financial Statements -> Income Statements.... and then a list of the various incomes statements. Same goes for sales (sales by region, by customer, by territory, etc.). Having tags I think would give a little TOO much flexibility as each report would need to have all of the necessary tags properly assigned (ie: Finance, Financial Statements, Income Statements) in order to be found, plus when searching the users are presented with a huge list of tags covering all aspects of the business that they need to sift through and select from.

Hi guys,

We've had discussions around this topic.  I think the root of the issue is that users need a method for easily finding their reports.  

There are a couple of different ideas on this topic-

-  Allow dashboards to be place in folders, and subfolders.  This creates a hierarchy of dashboards which provides the user with some good meta information about the dashboard or groups of dashboards.  But it does require the user to find the right path to their dashboard.

- Allow dashboards to have Tags assigned & allow users to search on a Tag or combination of tags.  This eliminates the hierarchical structure.

Assuming we could only do one of these methods, does anyone have strong feelings about which path to take?

Note - we'll want to use the same tools for finding reports in the Jet Web Client as well.

Steve