Guides → Content Manager

Incorta enables you to explore your data and create dashboards as well as provide insights to help you and your organization make decisions. With the Content Manager, you can create and organize folders for your dashboards.

Organizing your dashboards into folders and subfolders is important for numerous reasons.One reason is to enable users to easily share dashboards. Another reason is to limit access to dashboards for specific users or groups of users.

The goal of this guide is to explain how you can structure your folders so that your dashboard consumers can easily and securely find dashboards, navigate between dashboards, and share dashboards.

Content Manager overview

In the Content Manager, you can create dashboards, folders, and subfolders. Use folders to organize your content. Folders may contain multiple subfolders as well as other dashboards.

In a dashboard, you can create multiple tabs, each tab can contain multiple insights.

You can also do the following actions in the Content Manager:

• Create, edit, and delete folders or dashboards, according to your access rights
• Search for a dashboard or a folder
• Favorite dashboards
• Change the view of the content to be list view instead of card view
• Sort your content
• Play a slideshow of your favorites
• Share dashboards or folders
• Copy or move dashboards
• Import or export dashboards
• Connect to other visualization tools

For more information, refer to the Tools → Content Manager documentation.

Information architecture

The type of objects in the information architecture are as follows:

• Dashboard folder
• Dashboard

These objects have the following common properties:

• Name
• Owner
• Access rights (view, share, or edit) for specific users and groups of users

The information architecture affects how easy or difficult it is to share and manage your content. For example, if you have a new user, you can simply add them to the group you have previously shared a folder with.

So when you start planning your information architecture, think of an architecture that is going to be meaningful and easy to navigate through and share. For example, organize folders according to the business workflow or business process. Such an architecture works effectively when you combine data from different data sources.

You can also plan your folder structure according to your organization departments.

Example

Consider the following example as an information architecture for Supply Chain and Financials departments.

Imagine a parent folder named Financials. Create the following three subfolders under Financials:

• General Ledger (GL)
• Account Payables (AP)
• Account Receivables (AR)

Under the General Ledger (GL) folder, create another subfolder Drilldown that will be only dedicated for drill-down dashboards.

Under each folder and subfolder, you can create dashboards that are relevant to the folder they are located in. For example:

• Under General Ledger (GL), create two dashboards: “Financial Statements” and “Trial Balance and Journals”
• Under Account Payables (AP), create two dashboards: “Payables Overview” and “Holds and Discounts”

To learn more about folders, refer to Dashboard folder documentation.

Developer folder

For most organizations, developers will be responsible for creating insights and providing data to upper management and decision makers.

To help your organization achieve best results and enable your developers:

• Create a Developer folder at the top level of the content tree.
• Create subfolders under the Developer folder, where each subfolder is dedicated for a developer. In the dedicated subfolder, the developer will be able to create and manage their content.
• When the content is validated and ready to be published, the developer can share it with the administrator.
• The administrator can then move the content to the appropriate folder, where he will share the content with the stakeholders or decision makers.
• Share the Developer folder with the Developer group. So that the developers would:
  • See each other’s content.
  • Share ideas and leverage each other's work for more efficiency.
  • Assume ownership of another developer’s in process work if needed.

Drilldown folder

When you have dashboards that should only be reachable via the drilldown option from other dashboards, we recommend creating a separate folder with all drill-down dashboards, and then place this folder in the originating dashboards’ folder.

By placing the drilldown folder in the originating dashboards’ folder, the drilldown folder will have the same security as the originating dashboards.

If you are going to review a drill-down dashboard, place it at the same level of the originating dashboards.

The content of a drill-down folder will be accessible to the users who have permission to view the content of the parent folder.

Naming tips

Naming your folders and dashboards is important. The name can give an indication of whose folder or dashboard this is, or what the target audience is.

While naming the folders consider the following:

• Use short descriptive names, as the card view (default view) in the Content Manager does not display the full name.
• Avoid duplication of names between folders and dashboards to avoid confusion.
• Use the description field to help the users understand the content of the folder.
• Consider numbering to control the ordering of the content.

A dashboard folder name must adhere to the following naming validation rules:

• Must be unique to the user
• Must be between 1 and 255 characters in length
• Can start with or contain special characters and numbers

Content security and sharing access

When you are creating your folder structure, consider the content security and who should view or edit dashboards and folders.

You can share your content with the right user groups according to your needs. When you share, you can give different privileges :

• View - where users can only view the content, such as business users.
• Share - where users can view and share the content with other groups or users, such as analysts.
• Edit - where users can modify the content, such as developers.

Try dividing your content into public and private:

• The public content will serve the needs of most of your stakeholders.
• The private content will serve your analysts who build and share their own content.

If you want a dashboard to be only accessible via drill down, create a folder at the highest level for the dashboard and do not share it with the group.

User and group setup

Roles control what a user sees. These roles are assigned to groups and not to individual users to minimize the overhead of managing roles per user.

Create different groups with different roles that will benefit your business and security objectives.

Afterwards, you can start creating users and assign them to the appropriate group(s). Users inherit the roles assigned to the groups to which they belong.

If a user belongs to multiple groups, they will have the highest privilege available across all roles associated with these groups.

Assign the users to groups based on the content that they should see. For more information, refer to the Tools → Security Manager documentation.

Normally, you would have three types of stakeholders in your organization. The following table gives you an overview of what these stakeholders are.

Following the Information architecture example, consider the following sharing options:

Content Visibility

Objects are only visible to their owners (the users who created them) and to those with whom the objects are shared.

Therefore, since there is no user role in Incorta that would automatically see all objects, you may need to share all top level folders with a group that is assigned the SuperRole role.

By doing this you will ensure that all content is visible to all users that belong to that group. This would enable them to access the content that:

• Is breaking the system and needs to be fixed.
• Inactive or deleted users created.
• Is no longer needed and should be deleted.

Getting started with the Content Manager

After adding your data using the Data Manager and creating the needed schemas and loading your data using the Schema Manager, you can now start using the Content Manager.

Assume you need to create a folder to share with one of your developers and your administrator.

Prerequisites

You have two users:

• An administrator with the SuperRole role, for example DashboardAdmin.
• A developer with either Analyze User or Individual Analyzer roles, for example, JDoe.

Example

• Open the Content Manager by selecting the Content tab from the main menu.
• Add a folder by selecting the + New button in the action bar.
• Choose Add Folder.
• Enter a name for the folder, for example, JDoe-Dev, and then select Add.
  • The folder will appear as an outlined icon with a white background, which indicates an empty folder.
  • You are now the current owner of this folder.
• Share the folder by selecting the vertical ellipsis icon (⋮) on the folder, and then select Share Access.
• Start typing the name of the users you want to share the folder with, give both users (DashboardAdmin and JDoe) the right to Edit the folder, and then select Close.
  • You have now shared this folder with DashboardAdmin and JDoe.

The JDoe user should be able to open, share access, move, rename, and export folders and dashboards. In the following section, we will show you how to start creating a dashboard and add insights into it.

We will use the SALES schema that comes with the Sample Data.

• Log in to Incorta as JDoe.
• Open the Content Manager by selecting the Content tab from the main menu.
• Select the JDoe-Dev folder, and then select the + Add Dashboard button.
• Enter a name and description for your dashboard; for example, Sales, and then select Add.
  • You have now created your first dashboard with the name Sales.
• Rename the first tab by selecting the vertical ellipsis icon (⋮), and then select Rename.
• Enter the name of the tab, for example, Revenue, and then press Enter ↩.
• Select the + Add Insight button.
  • The Analyzer opens giving you different visualizations options to choose from so you can start creating your first insight. For more information, refer to the Analyze Guide.
  • To see the available visualizations that Incorta has, refer to the Visualizations documentations.
• From the Data panel, select Manage Dataset.
• Select the Tables tab, choose the SALES table, and select X to close the Manage Dataset panel.
• In the Insight panel, under Charts, select Donut.
• From the Data panel, drag and drop the following columns to the respective tray:
  • From the Product table, drag and drop Category to the Grouping Dimension tray.
  • From the Sales table, drag and drop Revenue to the Measure tray.
• Edit the insight title to be Revenue by Product Category.
• Select Save.
  • You have now added your first Donut insight to your dashboard.

• Navigate back to your JDoe-Dev folder and favorite the Sales dashboard by selecting the Star icon.
  • The dashboard will now appear in the Favorites section.

Additional Considerations

When you start creating your insights in a dashboard, consider the following tips while organizing your insights:

• Organize your insights according to your business needs. For example, the most important insights on the landing tab and other insights on non-landing tabs.
  Note

  Insights on non-landing tabs will not load until you decide to open the tab itself.

• Name your dashboard tabs with short descriptive names.
• Schedule important dashboards for delivery through the Content Manager or through the Scheduler.