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Creating Shared Dashboards

After setting up the Presentation Catalog structure and setting permissions, you can create shared dashboards and content for reuse by others. If you did not specify a dashboard when creating a group, you can create one now, selecting the appropriate group folder.

The advantage to creating shared dashboards is that sections that are created in the shared dashboard are actually shortcuts to folders in the /Shared folder. As such, you can remove them and add them again in a different column, page, or even a different dashboard. Users can create a My Dashboard from existing shared sections by clicking the Add Folder link and selecting the appropriate folder from the /Shared/Group or /Shared/Common folders in the Presentation Catalog.

If you plan to allow multiple users to modify the Presentation Services group's default dashboard, consider putting these users into another group. For example, suppose you create a Presentation Services group called Sales and create a default dashboard called SalesHome. Of the 40 users that are members of the Sales group, suppose that there are three who need to have the ability to create and modify content for the SalesHome dashboard. Create a SalesAdmin group, with the same permissions as the primary Sales group. Add the three users who are allowed to make changes to the SalesHome dashboard and content to this new SalesAdmin group, and give this group the appropriate permissions to the Presentation Catalog. This allows them to create and modify content for the SalesHome dashboard. If a user no longer requires the ability to modify dashboard content, you can change the user's group membership to Sales. If an existing Sales group member needs to have the ability to create dashboard content, the user's group membership can be changed to SalesAdmin.

Dashboards are stored in a special folder, _portal, that is hidden (unless the option to show hidden items is checked when working with the Presentation Catalog). The hidden _portal folder is located directly underneath a group folder. Because the dashboard is contained in the Group folder, all the permissions you set to the group folder are inherited.

You can create multiple dashboards within a Group folder, each of which will have its own folder (named the same as the dashboard name you assign) within the /_portal folder. Underneath the specific dashboard folder, for example, /_portal/SalesGroup Dashboard, are folders that correspond to the pages you have created in the dashboard. Underneath the page folder are folders for the columns.

NOTE:  Column folders are assigned names automatically by the system.

Within the column folders are the sections (folders or shortcuts to folders) that contain the items or shortcuts to items that appear in the dashboard.

For more information about creating shared dashboards, read About Managing Dashboards.