In our last edition of Customer Connection, we shared a sneak peak of the new user interface for the upcoming 8.0 release. The great news is 8.0 has more than just a new user interface. In this edition, we’d like to share with you some key features that we think you’ll be quite excited about.
Organizational Dashboards
While the product has had dashboard capability for quite some time, we’ve expanded to now offer 3 levels – 1. Plans, 2. Events and 3. Organizations. What does this mean for you? You can now have easily accessible dashboards which scope the data to current organization. This allows you to build summary dashboards for the organization and its children. Also, the navigation is now integrated into the UI.
Below we see a common use case for an organizational dashboard – a continuity program executive status view, showing an executive or manager the status of their continuity program within their organization. But the great thing is the product allows you to build your own dashboards – if you can use MS Word, you can build dashboards in Global AlertLink.
Relationship Builder
Relationships are key to an effective resilience program. Our relationship modeling tool is definitely one of the most used and valuable resources for our customers. Now with 8.0, it is even easier to create and manage relationships within the system. First, we will introduce a new Relationships tab with features such as auto-complete searching for objects, enhanced browse and advanced search features to find objects to relate. Adding relationships will now always be at the top so your users can quickly add multiple items at a time.
In addition, we are introducing a relationship builder WITHIN forms (see below). What does this mean for you? Now, your users can add relationships in the plan editor forms without the need to leave the screen. Better yet, you can configure the plan builder component within the form and place it wherever you like. Some examples of configurations are 1) ability to denote left and right object types – meaning you only want business processes on the left and applications on the right. 2) ability to denote specific relationship types – meaning for the given component, only specific relationship types are available to your users.
The goal is to make it easier to collect this critical relationship data form your end users. Be on the lookout for even more improvements in upcoming releases.