The answer: Yes, you can make these more dynamic yourself.
[I know, it’s weird to answer your own questions, but without the ability to write articles, knowledge sharing is limited to answering questions, so why not answer my own after I found out the answer myself?]
First: you can only schedule the data visualizations that are in the Platform Analytics library. From there you can start the schedule.
(If you haven’t done anything with Platform Analytics yet, data visualizations are the new name for ‘reports’).
As you can see, I selected the file type as ‘Embedded PNG’. This means that the report will be in the email as picture, instead of attachment, which makes it way more useful, especially if you are sharing more visualizations.
In the academy the ‘story telling’ was done with adding texts like ‘our team did an amazing job last month’, but is that always true? What if you are showing a backlog growth of 250% and the text reads ‘our team did an amazing job last month’? Next to the text always being the same, which isn’t a story, it can also just read as untrue. And nobody wants a CEO storming onto the department floor, yelling ‘fake news’.
I did some testing after my question on the academy wasn’t answered. You can use email notification scripts in the scheduled emails. And this opens up lots of possibilities.
Let’s say that you are sharing a semi donut of task_sla records grouped by ‘has breached’ to show the result of last week.
If you want to tell a story, you want to say something like ‘Look at our awesome team. Not a single SLA was breached last week’ or ‘We noticed that the breached SLA’s are concerning at the moment and we are looking into this’.
By using email notification scripts you can query to the task_sla table and check if there are any breached SLAs. If not, you can simply return your ‘we are awesome’ text into the scheduled email.
By defining your thresholds and making your notification script(s) check on these, you can create a huge number of different text fragments you are showing in your email.
In fact (just thinking of it now, not having tried it): if you want to, you could even leverage something like a private task to write some additional information about the previous week as a summary and have an email script pick up that description and put it into your email (just make sure you created it before the scheduled report is triggered).
It is now really possible to write a story around data visualizations that you export for stake holders (although I still think that if it is even a minor possibility within the requirements: revert them to dashboards, because those are showing the actual data, an email shows old data).
It will take some work to setup, but I think awesome things can be sent to stakeholders now.
The answer: Yes, you can make these more dynamic yourself.
[I know, it’s weird to answer your own questions, but without the ability to write articles, knowledge sharing is limited to answering questions, so why not answer my own after I found out the answer myself?]
First: you can only schedule the data visualizations that are in the Platform Analytics library. From there you can start the schedule.
(If you haven’t done anything with Platform Analytics yet, data visualizations are the new name for ‘reports’).
As you can see, I selected the file type as ‘Embedded PNG’. This means that the report will be in the email as picture, instead of attachment, which makes it way more useful, especially if you are sharing more visualizations.
In the academy the ‘story telling’ was done with adding texts like ‘our team did an amazing job last month’, but is that always true? What if you are showing a backlog growth of 250% and the text reads ‘our team did an amazing job last month’? Next to the text always being the same, which isn’t a story, it can also just read as untrue. And nobody wants a CEO storming onto the department floor, yelling ‘fake news’.
I did some testing after my question on the academy wasn’t answered. You can use email notification scripts in the scheduled emails. And this opens up lots of possibilities.
Let’s say that you are sharing a semi donut of task_sla records grouped by ‘has breached’ to show the result of last week.
If you want to tell a story, you want to say something like ‘Look at our awesome team. Not a single SLA was breached last week’ or ‘We noticed that the breached SLA’s are concerning at the moment and we are looking into this’.
By using email notification scripts you can query to the task_sla table and check if there are any breached SLAs. If not, you can simply return your ‘we are awesome’ text into the scheduled email.
By defining your thresholds and making your notification script(s) check on these, you can create a huge number of different text fragments you are showing in your email.
In fact (just thinking of it now, not having tried it): if you want to, you could even leverage something like a private task to write some additional information about the previous week as a summary and have an email script pick up that description and put it into your email (just make sure you created it before the scheduled report is triggered).
It is now really possible to write a story around data visualizations that you export for stake holders (although I still think that if it is even a minor possibility within the requirements: revert them to dashboards, because those are showing the actual data, an email shows old data).
It will take some work to setup, but I think awesome things can be sent to stakeholders now.
