Design one home page per role

As often as possible, assign only one home page to each role so that staff members can get used to one page of tasks. Typically, staff will remember tasks based on their position on the page. Having multiple pages is very disorienting.

You will want to assign more than one home page to Archibus Administrators and business process owners so they can change between the home pages used by all of the staff they support to see what the system looks like from that staff member's point of view.

Do not include the Applications tab on enterprise-facing roles

You may wish to define home pages as portal pages holding services for the staff at large (e.g. Reservations, Hoteling, Service Desk requests, H&S Incident Reports, etc.). Do not include the Applications tab on these rules.

You can still assign this role Navigator processes (and per the note below you should for the purposes of licensing). However, these processes will not appear on the home page for enterprise-facing staff.

Include the Applications tab on real estate and facility department roles

Include the Applications tab on real estate and facility department roles for staffers that may need to access the full range of reports and features of Archibus. Do so by assigning the AbDashboardPageNavigation-Home Page - Applications process to their role.

This makes the entire Navigator available to that role. If a process and task appear on that user's Navigator, it will appear within that user's Applications tab.

The Applications tab performs the same filtering as the Navigator:

• If a Process is not assigned to that user's role, it will not appear.
• If a Process is not part of an application assigned to that site, it will not appear.

Choose the first home page carefully

The default home page for each role will be the first home page process assigned to the role, as determined by the Display Order. You cannot make the Applications page the default home page.

Limit the number of panels and items on the home page

Less is more when it comes to home page selections.

• For enterprise-facing roles, the fewer choices they have the easier they will find the solution.
• For real estate and facility management roles, strive to have the few selections that staff will use 80% of the time. Remember that real-estate and facility management staff can always access any task or report they have rights to access from the Applications tab, and they can do so in three clicks.

Limit each row to four panels across

Doing so keeps the home pages displaying correctly on 1280px-wide screens, which covers laptops and a good swath of projectors. Archibus forms and reports will resize for wider screens. However, we made a deliberate decision not to flow the home pages. For one, there only should be so much material on a home page; otherwise, it starts to look complicated. For another, people remember tasks positionally by their panel and list position -- if the home pages flowed to rearrange the panels, they would have to re-search for each task every time.

Remember that staff can use the My Favorites panel

You may be tempted to create a large number of home pages suited for individuals, but doing so is unnecessary. Instead, depend on the My Favorites panel. Any real estate or facility management staff member can use the Applications tab to access a task and drag it to their Favorites panel. After that, it will appear on the Favorites panel on their home page. It will not appear on any other user's home page.

For real estate or facility management roles, include the My Favorites panel in the first or second row so that staff members can access their favorite quickly, without any scrolling.

Use half-height panels for the first two rows

Laptop screens are 768 pixels high, and full-height panels don't give a good overview of the material on the page.

Keep charting queries simple

Your staff members will use the home pages intensively and they must load almost instantly. Avoid complex queries for charts. If you have complex data to present, consider using the Archibus Metrics, which pre-calculate values daily so that they can instantly present top-level results and drill-downs by key granularities. You can use these values in the process metrics controls and in your home page bar charts.

Keep licensing in mind

Your staff members will only be able to access a task from a home page if they are assigned a valid license for the corresponding application. This means that:

• Your site must own a license for the application.
• You must assign the user a Navigator process that has this task. Assign this process in addition to the home page process.

When a user signs in, Archibus signs out licenses for all applications it needs to in order to give the user access to all of the processes assigned to that user. Whenever Archibus loads a view, it checks that the current user has a valid license for the application to which that task belongs. Archibus performs this check even if you load the task from the URL in the address bar (via a link or by typing the .axvw name) and even if you load the task from a home page that has links to tasks from multiple applications.

Technically, there may be a number of views you can load directly without a license, either because they are shared between applications or because they are not yet tagged to an application. However, per the Archibus licensing agreement, you always need a license for an application to load its views, and by assigning the processes containing the views, you ensure that the tasks your staff access will always load.

If the Metrics Framework license is not present, you can collect the metric values but cannot edit the metric definition (title, description, formula and frequency). In other words, you will be working with stock metrics that collect data but cannot be edited.