Many exciting things came from our first annual InfoBurst® User Conference. Getting to interact with our customers, seeing how they use the product, and hearing about the real world issues they face really help mold what InfoBurst Enterprise can become. This year we held a User Influence Meeting where we got to hear ideas from our users, and even still ideas from our own InfoBurst team based on discussions that organically grew during the meeting. The feedback we received was invaluable and we are excited to report many, if not all, of the ideas will be implemented in a future version of the product. Here’s a break down of things to come:
As many of you know, we released Build 122 in September. But what many of you might not know, is that two features in build 122 came directly from the User Influence Meeting.
Start Schedule Action
New action type has been added: users are now able to start a schedule from an action. This will give users the ability to cascade the running of schedules and event setup some intelligence to their bursting.
Custom names for Burst Documents
Users can now setup custom names for their burst documents in a burst. This is very useful for certain workflows where users wanted to add multiple burst documents from the same document to improve performance.
So, those enhancements are available right now in InfoBurst Enterprise and Dash, build 122. Next up are enhancements that will be included in a future build. No timelines for these have been established yet, but we are looking forward to getting these into the product.
- Cache Query Interface: Currently when adding a cache query to an XDC, you will have an “intermediate step” were the user is in the process of adding a cache query after selecting the data source to query. We’d like to improve this so it’s a single step and a “default query” is created which simply selects all of the data from the data source. Also we are looking at re-organizing bits of the interface to make the things users edit the most more up front. As an example, moving the SQL text into the first tab that the user will see when they select a cache query. Also to aid the users in testing their cache queries, we will remember the parameter values that were recently used so they do not have to be re-entered for each test.
- Database Connection Interface: Overall we are going to make the SQL input box bigger. Just like for cache query we will remember previously used parameters when testing a query. And finally we will add in the ability to clone a query. That way users can quickly backup a query before making major changes.
- Platform Credentials Interface: We will be revisiting the platform credentials interface in the user’s profile screen. Currently users have to select each platform from the dropdown to know if they have configured credentials for a given platform. We’d like to make that easier to identify at a glance which platforms are missing credentials.
- Warn if unsaved changes are present: Currently if changes are made on a tab of a UI element and the user navigates away without saving, the changes are reset. For example, if a user is editing a cache query, and navigates to another cache query before saving their changes, their changes are lost. We hope to be able to warn a user if there are unsaved changes in situations where the changes could be lost, much like we do when a user closes a window but minus the confirmation dialog.
- Restarting failed Bursts or XDCs while looking at Today’s Schedule: We would like to add in the ability for users to restart failed Bursts, XDCs, or even whole schedules from the Today’s schedule screen. This would enable users to quickly re-issue their work in the event of an identified outage that caused Bursts or XDCs to abort.
And that’s it. We’d like to give a big thank you to everyone who participated in the meeting, your feedback was very helpful in identifying areas of improvement for both functionality and workflow. We are looking forward to seeing everyone again at the next InfoBurst User Conference in 2014.
