User Defined Dashboards Now Shipping from mrc

September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

Earlier this year, mrc announced a feature of its m-Power development environment called user defined dashboards that puts more power in the hands of users. The product, it turns out, wasn’t quite fully baked. But now, we’re told, it’s ready to roll.

User defined dashboards are designed to enable users to pick and choose what graphical elements (such as charts, graphs, and tables) they will see on their dashboards and also where they are placed on the screen. After selecting the screen elements required for, say, a sales dashboard, the users save their work. The users can then access the dashboards at any time, and be confident that they reflect the latest data from DB2/400, SQL Server, or other data sources.

This approach puts more power into the hands of users, and makes them less dependent on highly skilled (and busy) m-Power developers to fulfill users’ every demand. The developers still must do the work of preparing the graphs and metrics for consumption by the end users, which involves working with m-Power templates and Java code generators. But the final look and feel of the resulting dashboards will be closer to what the users had in mind, making everybody happier.

“It puts users in the driver’s seat, and eliminates the need for developers to create multiple dashboards,” says Tyler Wassell, mrc’s manager of software development. “A single user-defined dashboard provides a completely customized view to each user.”

The company had announced that user-defined dashboards were available as part of a new m-Power release at the COMMON conference in Austin, Texas. To mrc’s credit, the company contacted IT Jungle earlier this summer when it became apparent that the new feature wasn’t, in fact, ready for prime time. Now that the feature is available, it will be interesting to see how customers utilize it.

Subscriptions to m-Power start at about $18,000 per year, while unlimited licenses are closer to $40,000. For more information, see www.mrc-productivity.com.