Based on limited usage of Mashzone (professional) I have come up with several items which I would like to see implemented (or learn how to do if they are already available)
1. NTLM authentication, this is almost a showstopper.
2. Spider charts-Someone in management found out about these and now we need to do lots of these. Having these available in MZ would be tremendous
3. Text Box, easy comments. Our current reporting (powerPoint format) is a combination of graphs and text. The text may be bullet points or paragraph style. Is there a recommended best practice on how to incorporate this into a mashapp? I was thinking of adding a 'comments' column in my excel and bringing it across as a table. This is ugly but could be a workaround. We want all information to come from the excel files.
4, Is there a best practice definition for each of the display components? I have gone through the manuals and there is some information there but for example I need to communicate to my process owners something like the following:
Line chart good for trending measurments
speedometer good for single value against a target
traffic light good for single value against thresholds
and so on. The issue is that with the easy tio implement 'cool' components like speedometers and so on the process owners will want to use the 'cool' features which may not be the best format for their measurement. Any guidance will be appreciated.
5. And finally, does anyone know if purchasing support would get us a named contact? I love the community forum but see that many posts die out without a solution. Do the posts get resolved offline or do people give up on solving the issue?
Thanks in advance
Donald
Hi Donald,
thanks for your interest in MashZone and for your feedback. We really appreciate. Let me comment your remarks.
- Unfortunately NTLM is currently not supported. With MashZone 2.0 we introduced LDAP connectivity, with 2.1 we introduced SSO based on My webMethods and SAML.
- Yes, the number of charts is fix - as of today, for users there is no way to add new charts types.
- To render text there is the label widget. It has a setting which enables you to use basic HTML tags to format the text (basically line breaks and list items). I know its not perfect, but it might help...?
- The guidance we provide is, in fact, a limited set of charts. Presentation of statistics is always tricky. And it highly depends on context information provided.
But as there so many different opinions about interpretation we don't publish guidelines. - Of course, we offer Enterprise support. In case you license Enterprise Edition, maintenance includes product updates as well as ARIS hotline support.
- The Quick start guide might be minimized but not be dismissed at all.
Regards
Stephan
Stephan,
Thanks for your feedback, my thoughts on your comments:
1. LDAP / SSO - are these for accessing the MZ mashapps or applicable for example when my excel files are on a sharepoint and we use NTLM authentication? I cannot create the datafeeds necessary. This is an obstacle for me to purchase an Enterprise version.
2. Can Spider chart be added to requirements list for future development?
3. I will have to experiment with this.
4. OK, I will find guidance on this elsewhere.
5. thanks
6. I would love to see an option to dismiss the Quick Start Guide completely, it is very annoying and even when you minimize it and save, the next time you open the datafeed/mashapp the Quickstart guide is maximized.
thanks
Donald