This page outlines best practices to be used for emailing reports from the Analytics Portal.
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It’s important to note before following this document that the Analytics Portal stores user Viewer filters; this is done to improve user experience. |
When creating Dashboard for email distribution, the Shoplogix requirements are:
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Here are the key best practices which will ensure your Emailed Dashboards are consistently successfully delivered. Below the list, we provide more detailed training on how to perform each of these best practices, and an explanation why these changes will help ensure delivery success.
Create separately dedicated Emailed Dashboards and Interactive Dashboards to ensure end users and their active filtering does not affect their expected daily/weekly/etc emails
Lock Filters for your Emailed Dashboards to ensure end users do not accidentally change filters when using the Analytics reporting system on a web browser
Limit number of Widgets to 12 per Emailed Dashboard and number of Pivot Tables to 5 per Emailed Dashboard
Ensure there is only one Designer for your Emailed Dashboards
Choose either PDF OR Embedded to reduce server load while processing your Emailed Dashboards
Spread your Dashboard Timing across multiple time periods
1. Creating separately dedicated Emailed Dashboards and Interactive Dashboards:
Dedicate a folder to emailed Dashboards and manage accordingly
Dashboards for general use should not be stored in the same folder as emailed Dashboards
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If emailed Dashboards are required to be available for general use to viewers, then please duplicate and share
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User Why do I need to do this? Viewer filters are stored to the user, and emails emailed dashboards will take these filters into consideration upon email execution
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. This can easily cause confusion for Viewers who are unclear about this functionality. When you have many viewers who are individually interacting with an Emailed Dashboard, each Viewer is creating a custom instance of an email request. When too many individual emails are requested at the same time, some of them may timeout.
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Allowing filtering on email dashboards can result in the email being received with unexpected data and time-outs on email generation |
2. Locking Your Filters for your Emailed Dashboards:
Create Dashboard and filters as required
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Lock the Filters on the Dashboard
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A reload icon will appear once you have done this, which would be used to reset to default filters if required
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Why do I need to do this? Viewer filters are stored to the user, and emailed dashboards will take these filters into consideration upon email execution. This can cause confusion for Viewers who are expecting the original dashboard’s data intent (i.e. Yesterday). Each individualized Dashboard will also force the email engine to load the Dashboard separately, and when too many emails are requested, your Viewers may experience timeouts.
Disabling interactive widget Filtering
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Please be sure to deselect this 'widget affects dashboard filters' feature/function for all widgets.
3. Limit the number of Widgets to 12 and the number of Pivot Tables to 5 per Emailed Dashboard
Each Widget in a Dashboard performs separate Queries against your database. The recommended limit for widgets per emailed dashboard is 12.
A Pivot Table in particular performs multiple Queries against the database, depending on the complexity of the Pivot. The recommended limit for Pivots per emailed dashboard is 5.
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Splitting Large Dashboards will help your Email delivery success. Considering focused Dashboards per Role/Audience, Timeperiod or specific Dataset will avoid information overload as well. |
Why do I need to do this? When you create a Dashboard which performs too many Queries against the database, the likelihood of a timeout failure grows. Shoplogix has confirmed that the failure rate grows significantly when our Designers create Dashboards which exceed these limits. We continue to focus on improving our scalability and appreciate your effort to work with us on driving successful usage of our Emailing capabilities.
4. Share Your Emailed Dashboards to co-workers as Viewers, no Designers:
Share your Emailed Dashboard
Once all of the Filters are set as required and locked, you can then begin to share the Dashboard with other users.
“Can View” = Sharing Only
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There is an option to Share a Dashboard to another user as “Can Design”, however Shoplogix does NOT recommend this for Emailed Dashboards.
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A best practice is to Share your Dashboard with the Entire Plant. You will find the Plant Name in your sharing list, or you can type your Company Name and it will filter properly. This ensures that any new employees will receive the Emailed Dashboard after they first login to Shoplogix Analytics once |
Enable or disable “Users cannot change their subscription settings” here
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Emails can be sent asWhy do I need to do this? Having multiple Designers for a Dashboard - yourself and anyone else you choose - can lead to confusion when edits and re-publishes happen. A designer who is not an Owner cannot control some elements of the Dashboard design, like Filter Defaults. This will especially lead to confusion when your Viewers are expecting a standardized report with specific data and the Owner/Designer are applying conflicting changes.
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If you want to let another Designer make changes to your Dashboard, Shoplogix recommends you use the best practice of Re-Assigning Ownership whenever you want to make changes and republish. |
5. Choose One Delivery Format, Embedded or PDF:
Please choose one of the email report formats when you setup your email report settings:
Embedded: Snapshot of the dashboard is embedded directly into the email
PDF: A PDF attachment of the dashboard is emailed to recipients
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Why do I need to do this? The Email engine needs to generate your Dashboard twice if you request Embedded and PDF versions. If your dashboard is quite large (many widgets or pivot tables), loads a large amount of data (long-term-trends, > 1 week of data), or is shared with a large number of people, there is a higher chance that the email will timeout before completing the load of both Embedded and PDF, and you may receive only 1 format or possibly neither.
PDF Design
PDF can be optimally resized and redesigned by clicking “Edit/View PDF Report”
Toggle to “Edit Mode” to manually edit the size of widgets in the PDF:
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Note: Editing your dashboard layout by adding, removing, and moving widgets will result in the PDF settings being lost; You will need to re-edit the PDF settings after making dashboard changes. |
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6. Spread the Timing of your Emailed Dashboard across multiple time periods:
Shoplogix recommends that you schedule emails to be sent 1 hour after the last shift ends that you would like to be included in that report.
See Working with Shift and Time Data for more on how to work with Shift and Time Data.
Widget Limits
The recommended limit for widgets per dashboard is 12. This is to prevent an emailed dashboard from getting too large and failing to send.
Shoplogix also recommends that you review the timing of your plant’s Emailed Dashboards, and spread the timing across multiple time periods whenever possible.
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Example: Your night shift ends at 4am, and your Daily Meetings are at 7am. If we wait for an hour after shift end, we could set emailed Dashboards to send at 5am, 5:30am, 6am and 6:30am. For Weekly and Monthly Reports, try to choose timing which does not conflict with your Daily reports. |
A Final Note Regarding Time Stamps
Please note that the time stamps for cube updates and emailed reports are timestamp which you will see in your Emailed Dashboards is in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is 4 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time (EST). Development has been asked to look into adding GMT directly into Analytics Portal and emailed reports so cube update times are self explanatory internally and to our customers.
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. The time here is in GMT because your Emailed Dashboard could be sent to people in many time zones. We will look into adding better clarity in the future.
The time you see in a Web Browser will reflect the build time in your Local Time Zone.
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