The dashboards provide a centralized information hub, where concurrent information about Composica and its projects can be found and managed. Composica consists of two dashboards:
- Composica dashboard, which appears after logging in to the application and displays aggregated information from all projects available to the user.
- Project dashboard, which appears when accessing a specific project and displays information that is directly related to the project.
The dashboards provide the following utility buttons:
 |
The Dashboard Preferences button provides control over the displayed widgets, the header color of each widget and the number of displayed entries. Press the Reset button to change back to the default configuration. Under the Tasks tab, the Report Options button shows or hides the task report options panel at the top of the report. |
 |
The Refresh button reloads the dashboard contents so it reflects the most recently updated information. |
 |
The Print button, only available under the Tasks tab, prints a printer friendly version of the selected task report. |
 |
The Export to Disk button, only available under the Tasks tab, saves a printer friendly version of the selected task report to disk, in HTML format. |
 |
The Review Dashboard button, only available under the Composica dashboard, and only if the current user has any active review invitations, provides access to the Review Dashboard where these reviews can be accessed. |
 |
The Account Settings button, provides access to the Accounts Settings dialog, where different settings such as email address and password can be changed. |
 |
The Send Feedback button, opens a dialog allowing to send feedback to the Composica team with any suggestions or remarks. In some systems this functionality might not be available. |
 |
The Logout button, only available under the Composica dashboard, signs the user out of the system. |
The information presented in the dashboards is divided into tabs: Dashboard, Tasks, Blog and Projects (in the project dashboard Only):
- Under the Dashboard tab, the information is organized into widgets. The functionality of most of widgets is similar in both dashboards; however, some widgets are only available in one of the dashboards. The arrangement of widgets in the dashboard can always be swapped by simply dragging widgets to the desired location.
- The Tasks tab provides a task report of the current project, or a summary of all projects in the Composica dashboard.
- The Blog tab provides each project with a developers blog, to help team members freely share information with each other and discuss development aspects. Under the Composica dashboard, the Blog tab provides a summary of all the available developers blogs.
- The Projects tab in the project dashboard provides a quick method to find and open a different project, providing a projects tree, a tagged tree for quick tag look-up, and a search box allowing to filter projects by tags or by text. The archived projects tree contains projects that are not currently in active use, and have been flagged as archived. A quick snapshot of the selected project is shown to the right, along with basic information about it.
Quick Start
Each dashboard provides a Quick Start panel, providing quick access buttons to common actions.
The following buttons are available from the Composica dashboard:
- Last Project – Launches Composica and opens the last accessed project. This button is only available if a project has been previously opened.
- New Project – Launches Composica and opens the project creation wizard, allowing to create a new project.
- Open Project – Shows the Select Project dialog, allowing to choose a project to launch.
- Import – Launches Composica and opens the Import / Export dialog, allowing to import an existing project to the system.
- Getting Started – Launches the Composica help manual to the Getting Started chapter.
- Administration – Shows the administration dialog, giving access to different administrator functions, such as user management, global settings and activation. This button is only available for users with administrator privileges.
The following buttons are available from the project dashboard:
- Last Document – Open the last accessed document in the project. This button is only available if a document has been previously opened.
- New Document – Creates a new document. Opens the New Document dialog, to allow choosing a title, document type, and tree position for the new document.
- Open Document – Opens the Select Document dialog, allowing to choose a document to be opened for design.
- Manage – Opens the Project Manager.
- Preview – Shows a quick preview of the entire project.
- Publish – Opens the Publish Project dialog.
- Import / Export – Opens the Import / Export dialog, allowing to import an existing project to the system, or export the current project.
- New Project – Opens the project creation wizard, allowing to create a new project.
- Find Document – Opens the Find Documents by Tags dialog, allowing to find documents by tags across all projects in the system.
Widgets
The following widgets are available:
- News
- Tasks
- Team Members
- Modified Projects
- Modified Documents
- Recent Blog Posts
- Recent Blog Comments
- RSS Feeds
- Saved Chats
- Reviews
- Web Publications
- Recent Publications
- Links
- My Notes
Provides a place to post global notes and administrative messages. These are displayed to all the users in the environment and are not attached to any specific project. Administrators can add new posts and edit existing ones.
Composica provides a comprehensive Tasks management mechanism including task assignment, task priority, tags, task comments, task mail notification, audit trails, and more.
The project dashboard displays tasks from the current project and the Composica dashboard displays tasks from all the projects that are available to the user.
Using the Tasks widget the user can filter the relevant tasks in various ways, to plan the work more efficiently. Press on a task to open the project it’s associated with, and the Related Tasks dialog.
Users can easily see the current online status of each team member as well as the project/document they are currently working on, and have immediate access to it.
In the project dashboard, pressing on an online user’s name will initiate a chat with them.
To update your own status message, press on the Status Message icon in the widget’s header, edit your status, and press Update.
Only available in the Composica dashboard.
Provides a list of recently modified projects, along with the last person who edited them and the modification time. The project can either be previewed, or opened by pressing on its name.
Provides a list of recently modified documents, along with the last person who edited them and the modification time. The document can either be previewed, or opened by pressing on its name.
The project dashboard displays recently modified documents from the current project. The Composica dashboard displays recently modified documents from all projects available to the user, along with an option to preview each relevant project.
In the project dashboard, the Recent Blog Posts widget displays blog posts from the current project. In the Composica dashboard it displays blog posts from all projects available to the user.
Press on a post’s title to switch to the Blog tab and see a detailed view of that post. To comment about a post, press the Add Comment button. The Permalink link can be used to access the post from outside the dashboard.
To go back to the dashboard view, press the Dashboard tab.
Provides an aggregated view of comments on blog posts.
Press on a comment’s title to switch to the Blog tab and see a detailed view of that comment, along with its related post. To add another comment to the post, press the Add Comment button. To remove a comment, use the Remove button. The Permalink link can be used to access the comment from outside the dashboard.
To go back to the dashboard view, press the Dashboard tab.
Developer blogs also offer RSS/Atom feeds, which developers can subscribe to in order to keep track of the blogs using their favorite feed reader.
In the project dashboard, the Blog RSS Feeds widget displays a link to the feed for the current project’s blog. In the Composica dashboard, a list of all the feeds available to the user is displayed.
Composica provides real-time chats between two or more users. These chats can be saved as ‘meeting logs’ to be later accessed, previewed or removed.
The project dashboard displays recently saved chats from the current project, and the Composica dashboard displays recently saved chats from the all projects available to the user.
The Saved Chats widget also provides a search functionality to quickly find a chat based on its content.
Only available in the project dashboard.
Provides a list of all existing review invitations, along with their current status. Click on any item to open the Manage Review dialog with the relevant review selected.
Only available in the project dashboard.
Lists all web server publications of the project, and provides a button to view each publication, and a button to remove (unpublish) each publication.
Only available in the project dashboard.
Lists recent publications of the project, along with the publish method, the publish date and the name of the author that initiated the publish.
Authors can add common links to the work environment.
Links can either be Public, or Personal and available only to the user who added them. In the project dashboard, Project links can also be added, associating them to the current project.
Press on the Add Link button in the widget’s header to add a new link or the Edit Link button to modify an existing one.
Each user has a personal ‘To Do’ notes widget. Any text entered in the widget is personal and can only be viewed by the user, and will remain there until it’s removed.