LBI Structure / Framework For Maximum End User Flexibility

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Eric D
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    I know lengthy posts often get glossed over so I tried to provide the quick, to the point post and then if needed, the background for the much appreciated person that responds.

    THE PROBLEM:
    Looking for guidance on setting up a framework or structure that will provide non-technical users flexible and "unmanaged" ability to add/edit/remove documents, spreadsheet, and reports. Looking for a high level "dashboard" to provide the structure / hyperlinks / relationships of more detailed documents. So more of an organized document repository than providing information. My first thought was to create "static" locations a file server that LBI could maintain persistent hyperlinks to as a way to guide the group to related information. The person would put the documents into the appropriate directories. So while the the files may seem disorganized, LBI would provide the organization as the front-end.

    Does anyone have any suggestions or better approach?

    Thanks for any help!



    BACKGROUND for further clarification:
    We have a management level group that comes together for monthly meeting to discuss their area of responsibility. Prior to their meeting, information and supporting documents are made available to the group to review so the meetings are to discuss the solutions and not the problems. Currently the group has a shared and secure directory and sub-directories on a file server that they put there documents in. As you could imagine there is not a structure on how documents are related to each other so except for the one that produced the items no one knows how everything is related. The content would be edited throughout the month by the various managers which eventually be reviewed by the group. Since files names and the number of documents would change each month, I wouldn't want to be continually maintaining LBI with rights, file names, etc.

    Matthew Nye
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      I think youve got the right idea. Ive done something like this but you could really get advanced with it.

      1. Use SmartNotifications to create an InfoSet that retrieves file names from a network share
      2. Construct a dynamic Application Link for each row to open the document on click
      3. All documents use a predefined SmartCoding string in the name (ie FIN1201 to represent Finance Dept for the 1st period of 2012) and placed in the network share
      4. Create a Notification and using filters, conditions or grouping, organize the results to be relevant to the specific users of a dashboard.

      Step 4 is where you can do the real fancy stuff. You could have a separate folder for each document type, then using your SmartCoding filters and the merge condition you can combine all the documents for a given project or area into one listing. If you wanted to dive into Template customization you can also enable sorting and filtering for the end users or even expose the ability to refresh the data. Because youre not hitting a transactional database, you can actually set the infoset to NOT be cached without worry about too much of a performance hit (assuming you dont have thousands of users hitting that notification).

      hth,
      Matt
      If any of my answers were helpful an endorsement on LinkedIn would be much appriciated! www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-nye/1a/886/760/
      Robby
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        Matthew:
        This sounds interesting! I've never used a "File Location" data source in Smart Notifications.
        What is the correct file path syntax for the field "Location:" in the "Work With Data Sources" setup screen?
        Thanks in Advance!
        -Robby
        Matthew Nye
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        Posts: 514
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          Actually you dont need to create a Data Source when viewing a listing of files. When you create your InfoSet just select "File System" from the Type drop down and supply the root path that you want to monitor.
          If any of my answers were helpful an endorsement on LinkedIn would be much appriciated! www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-nye/1a/886/760/