Connect UX apps from a single dashboard

BrunoRodriguez

We currently operate with Apps that act as silos, but sometimes it would be good to have a centralised dashboard that can work as a connection across apps to ensure a seamless flow across the dashboards built.

ryanwcloud

Hi Bruno - you can actually do this now. I haven't seen documentation (to be honest I haven't really looked), but if you do the following, you can connect a single dashboard to multiple models:

1. On the app contents page, for whatever app page you want connected to multiple models, click the ellipsis and select "Move page".
2. Move the page to whatever app you'd like to connect to.
3. Add a 'Link to a page' - text card, module, whatever. This will establish the "hyperlink" to wherever the user should go to.
4. Go back to the App Content pane in the app you moved the original page to and move it back to the original app.

Not the easiest/quickest way, but I have not found any other solution.

BrunoRodriguez

https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/comment/155626#Comment_155626

I was actually making an article about that exact logic today. I was planning on publishing it tomorrow. The downfall is that it does not follow PLANS

ryanwcloud

How does this not follow PLANS? I look at PLANS as more of a modeling guideline and not an App design guideline - sure you want the App to be logical, auditable, etc. but I don't see how connecting to another app clashes with PLANS?

BrunoRodriguez

This will be summary of the article:

"In summary, this article has presented an alternative to connect multiple Apps in a seamless way through a “Central distributor” dashboard. The App connectivity comes at a price, so please evaluate whether is worth applying it since this approach is not sustainable nor auditable (https://community.anaplan.com/kb/articles/70772-plans) given that once you try to edit the cards with hyperlinks, they will show as blank. Nevertheless, the links created remain in place once the dashboard is moved to another App, but the dashboard also needs to be moved multiple times to configure all the hyperlinks required, which is a repetitive task and may become an issue once hyperlinks change. "

Basically, once you set up the hyperlinks is not very auditable since the hyperlink is set as blank, and once you apply it to scale it is not sustainable, as every change needs to be applied across the board

BrunoRodriguez

@ryanwcloud,

Please find the article in the following link:

https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/154980/community-perspective-how-to-achieve-multi-app-accessibility-from-a-single-dashboard

Feel free to suggest any ideas there and thank you for the answer here. It was funny to receive it just today.

CommunityMember127794

@BrunoRodriguez

Arguably, NUX flies in the face of PLANS. It exists outside of ALM and outside of model history. Changes to NUX pages cannot be audited because there is no change log. Manually propagating NUX changes from Dev to QA to UAT to Prod is prone to error. Utilizing module views instead of custom views mitigates some of this, but we sacrifice formatting options in exchange for maintainability.

BrunoRodriguez

Hello @CommunityMember127794,

While I agree with all your points, the fact that you cannot know where a hyperlink will take you just by simply editing the dashboard (with the current alternative to this idea) is something worrysome.

Happy to hear more thoughts though!