Providing Shared Dashboards for Users

This section contains the following topics on providing shared dashboards for users:

Understanding the Catalog Structure for Shared Dashboards

Catalog structure of “My Folders” and “Shared Folders” for shared dashboards.

The Oracle BI Presentation Catalog has two main folders:

  • My Folders — Contains the personal storage for individual users. Includes a Subject Area Contents folder where you save objects such as calculated items and groups.

  • Shared Folders — Contains objects and folders that are shared across users. Dashboards that are shared across users are saved in a Dashboards subfolder under a common subfolder under the /Shared Folders folder

Note:

If a user is given permission to an analysis in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog that references a subject area to which the user does not have permission, then the BI Server still prevents the user from executing the analysis.

Creating Shared Dashboards

After setting up the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog structure and setting permissions, you can create shared dashboards and content for use by others.

One advantage to creating shared dashboards is that pages that you create in the shared dashboard are available for reuse. Users can create their own dashboards using the pages from your shared dashboards and any new pages that they create. You can add pages and content as described in User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

If you plan to allow multiple users to modify a shared default dashboard, then consider putting these users into an application role. For example, suppose that you create an application role called Sales and create a default dashboard called SalesHome. Of the 40 users that have been assigned the Sales application role, suppose that there are three who must have the ability to create and modify content for the SalesHome dashboard. Create a SalesAdmin application role, with the same permissions as the primary Sales application role. Add the three users who are allowed to make changes to the SalesHome dashboard and content to this new SalesAdmin application role, and give this role the appropriate permissions in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog. This allows those three users to create and modify content for the SalesHome dashboard. If a user no longer requires the ability to modify dashboard content, then you can change the user's role assignment to Sales. If an existing Sales role user must have the ability to create dashboard content, then the user's role assignment can be changed to SalesAdmin.

See Managing Dashboards in System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

Testing the Dashboards

Before releasing dashboards and content to the user community, perform some tests.

  1. Verify that users with appropriate permissions can correctly access it and view the intended content.
  2. Verify that users without appropriate permissions cannot access the dashboard.
  3. Verify that styles and skins are displayed as expected, and that other visual elements are as expected.
  4. Correct any problems you find and test again, repeating this process until you are satisfied with the results.

Releasing Dashboards to the User Community

What to do after testing is complete.

Notify the user community that the dashboard is available, ensuring that you provide the relevant network address.