The starter ICommander Intranet that ICommander Support Staff installs for you
includes an example of a Management Information Dashboard with various
ICommander Generated Reports in various forms plus examples of various graphs
created with the Ploticus Graphing Package which gets installed at the same
time. The sample Management Information Dashboard pages use particular types
of layout and navigation. The Examples menu choice on the starter Home Page
includes examples of several alternate layouts and navigation in case you prefer
a different approach.
The concept of a Management Information Dashboard is to provide a centralized source on the Intranet for various types of information that management of your organization would like to easily access via their browser. The example installed with your starter Intranet is in a public area but it is simple to setup your actual pages in an area that requires a username and password and only allows authorized management and staff to access it.
If you are willing to learn a little bit about maintaining web pages via ICommander File Manager with the Vim Editor, this approach is the most flexible for presenting information to management.
Automatic Management Information Center Option
If your only need is for publishing various ICommander reports and Free-Form Data Extraction output in various forms to make them easily available to managers via their browser, there is a very simple alternative. All you need to do is decide on a starting directory (and applicable subdirectories, if needed) and then use the various ICommander Web Page Generation tools to route all reports for management to that area. Then use a single link on your Intranet to point to this directory using an ICommander Developed CGI Script that will scan it for web pages and automatically create an index web page that lists all of the reports available.If you prefer not to have a link to this area on your public Intranet pages (in order to reduce curiosity of staff not allowed to access), you can give your authorized managers an address to insert in their web browser to access it. You may also then help them convert that to a Desktop Shortcut on the manager's Windows PC, if desired.
Since ICommander is aware that you may use this automatic index page generation facility, it generates web pages in a manner that optimizes the usefulness of the index. This includes reporting from where in the ICommander Menu System that each web page was created. This makes it very efficient when a manager is reviewing the information available and notices that a report that he or she is interested in is from several days ago. Since you know exactly where to recreate the web page, you can replace it with an updated version in just a few seconds and then contact the manager and instruct him or her to refresh the index page to see the updated report.
The index page will also have a link to "More ICommander Info" next to each report in the table of web pages. This will bring up a display that shows when the report was created, the accounting period involved when applicable, and parameters used to create the report when applicable. This enables quick review by a manager when there are several reports in order to decide whether to proceed with viewing the web page report itself.
If you elected to enter an "Alert Note" when you created any of the web pages in this area, it will be displayed in red under the title of the report on the index table.
The generation of the web index page also checks the File Manager area where the Intranet location for each report is tracked for the potential of a File Notes File for each report web page. If File Notes are found, there will be a link to the notes in the web page index table labelled "Notes about this Report". Use this when you have reviewed a report and noted particular areas that you believe are important to your managers.
If you end up with MANY reports in this area, it is simple to restructure into
several subdirectories. An example might be directories for financial
statements, customer information, receivables, payables, daily sales, employee
information, etc. It is simple to use ICommander File Manager to create the new
directories and to move existing reports to their new directories. Getting the
applicable reports to go to the new directories may be done as they are
recreated by specifying the applicable subdirectory. Alternatively, you may
edit the Intranet Location Tracking Files to specify the new directory location
for each report so that it will default to the updated location the next time
you generate it.