Community perspective: How to achieve multi-app accessibility from a single dashboard

As Anaplan moves forward, many companies are implementing Connected Planning across their entire organisations. This means that as the Anaplan implementation grows - multiple models or multiple functional areas across a single model- generally arise.

This is currently being resolved through the use of multiple Apps to arrange the dashboards in a meaningful way. However, these Apps work as silos given that we cannot navigate across them in the same way we do across dashboards, as we cannot natively set hyperlinks from a dashboard in an App to one in a different App.

In this article, I will share a simple option that although does not follow the best practices defined by PLANS, allows the implementation of connectivity across Apps.

The first step in this process is the creation of a Landing Page that will act as a “Central Distributor” across Apps, as shown below:

Figure 1. Initial set-up of the Centralised Dashboard without hyperlinks.

As you seen in Figure 1, this is just a general Landing Page without any hyperlinks. However, we can move this dashboard from “App X” to a different App – let’s call it “App 1”- and this is where the interesting part starts.

 Figure 2. Setting up the dashboard to move it to another App.

Once the dashboard is in “App 1”, as displayed in Figure 2, it is possible to set-up a link with dashboards within the same App – as we do regularly.

Figure 3. Enabling a hyperlink between one of the image cards and a dashboard in the same App.

The hyperlink presented in Figure 3 will allow the user to navigate seamlessly across “App 1”, flowing from dashboard A to B, which is nothing new yet.

Figure 4. App specific Landing Dashboard accessed through the “Central Distributor” dashboard.

Up to this point, we have just moved a dashboard across “App X” to “App 1”, and created hyperlink within the dashboards in “App 1”. However, if we move the latest version of the “Central Distributor” dashboard to another App – “App 2” - the hyperlink is maintained, and it will take us from the “App 2” where the dashboard is now located to “App 1” where the specific target is located.

As such, we can now get creative moving the “Central Distributor” across Apps, creating individual hyperlinks to the specific Landing Pages within each of them. Once all the hyperlinks are set, each of them will redirect to the specific Apps where the hyperlink was set-up. From this point, we will have to copy the “Central Distributor” version to each of the Apps, but it will now allow us to navigate freely across Apps. The idea being that – once ready- the “Central Distributor” dashboard will be in every single app, allowing the flow between the landing pages for each App, but to move back from each of the App Landing Pages to the “Central distributor”, as shown below in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The Final Central distributor dashboard will be copied back to all the Apps once it is ready with all hyperlinks.

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 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.

As the possibility of creating these capabilities has been proved possible, I really look forward to a native and sustainable way to go through this process provided by Anaplan. Hopefully it has been included in the roadmap @rob_marshall ?