Portal Overview
Understanding Portal terminology is a prerequisite for understanding the functionality. The following figure highlights naming conventions for each area in the interface.
Figure 2.1 Portal Naming Conventions
The StorageConsole Portal is organized into the following major sections, accessed from the top of your browser window. Refer to the
Major Areas in the Portal figure, along with the following descriptions.
1. Quick Search - Use
Quick search to find and run a template, report or a dashboard by name. Search is case insensitive, supports partial entries, and will display a list of potential matches using a string match. If the Cloud is enabled, search results will also include user report templates available from the cloud. Because you can directly run a report from your
Quick search results, this enables you to preview any cloud template before you save it locally. Results are displayed in a full search page that allows you to filter results further or start a new search. See
Templates, Reports, and Dashboards Overview.
2. Menu Bar
• Tools - The Tools page provides access to designers that enable custom report template creation: the Dynamic Template Designer; the SQL Template Designer, an advanced feature, requiring experience in SQL (Structured Query Language) development; and the Methods Designer to create special processing methods to be included in report templates created with the Dynamic Template Designer. The Tools list also provides access to the File List Exporter (if you have licensed the File Analytics product). The exporter assembles file analytics metadata into a comma-separated values (.csv) file, and allows you to export for further analysis.
• Alerts - The Alerts page provides access to system notifications with the ability to view and suppress them.
• Admin - This page provides consolidated access to functions that allow administrators to manage the Portal, create users, groups, set up data collection, plus set privileges for report and feature access.
3. User Account Menu - This drop-down menu provides convenient access to account-specific features such as managing your profile information, your homepage, and access to your scheduled reports.
4. Help - Displays context sensitive help for the page. This menu also displays the software version (About) and provides access to the Welcome page. The Welcome page provides up-to-date information about trade shows, releases, and new features.
6. Badges - The
Home and
Cloud sections in the Explorer will display badges if new or updated reports are available. See
About Badging.
7. Action Bar - In the Explorer, the element you select, such as a folder, a report, a template or a shortcut, determines the operations made available. The Action bar automatically changes when an element is selected, showing you what operation are available. See
About the Action Bar.
8. Sections in the Navigation Panel - The Explorer window is divided into sections: Home, Shared with Me, Cloud and Recent. Click each section to reveal additional areas of functionality. See
Sections in the Explorer Navigation Panel.
9. View Panel - This management panel is a window into your reporting inventory, allowing you to browse through and manage StorageConsole templates, reports and dashboards. You can quickly identify when new/updated templates are introduced and choose to update or not. You can view mappings between reports and templates, if sharing is enabled, detailed report descriptions and other information. On the management side, you can create, edit, and delete reports, plus organize them into a folder structure that is relevant to your business. See also
About the Explorer and
Templates, Reports, and Dashboards Overview. Visit our YouTube channel to view demonstration videos featuring specific areas of the product:
http://www.youtube.com/user/APTAREIncFigure 2.2 Major Areas in the Portal
Browser Tab Basics
Navigating in the Portal is made easy through the use of tabs to display functionality with templates and reports simultaneously. As the number of open tabs increases, you can always quickly navigate to management pages, such as the Explorer, Admin or Tools, by clicking the relevant category on the menu bar.
There are a few basic navigation features that are important to know:
Scrolling through tabs - As the number of opened tabs increases, a scrolling icon is displayed on either side of the page. This icon allows you to move quickly through your open tabs, even if they are not visible on the page.
Viewing all tabs - If you’ve opened more tabs than will fit in the window, use the tab list to view and navigate through all open tabs.
Changing the tabs order - To move a tab to a different place on the tab strip, drag it using your mouse. While you’re dragging a small indicator shows where the tab will land.
Show tab list - As many tabs are opened, the browser will become filled with tabs and some will not be visible on the page. At this point, an arrow at the far right of the tabs enables a selection of the full list of open tabs.
New Dashboard - A tab with a plus icon is always displayed to create a new dashboard, as required.
Closing one or all tabs - You can close all tabs at once, close a single active tab, or close all tabs but the active one by right-clicking directly on top of a tab.
Figure 2.3 Tab Navigation Basics