Once you have built and deployed your dashboards, it’s important for your team to be familiarized with the sharing functions available in your BI platform to drive collaboration and action as part of your users’ end-to-end analytics process. This ensures accessibility to critical information and insights across the entire organization.

Today, modern analytics suites have discussion, sharing and co-authoring as embedded features – but many are still evolving their offerings. Yellowfin has several in-built features designed to support the sharing of dashboard metrics and insights in a user-friendly manner.

Yellowfin has two distinct views designed for each individual user to track events that occur in the BI system across multiple dashboards, so they can better collaborate with other users to edit, manage and share discoveries and any tasks they are assigned or associated with.

The first view is called Timeline Feed and enables the user to explore events that have occurred in the system related to them or their connections. This consists of content creation, comments, views, tasks and more. They can see the full range of events on a separate Timeline Events page. While on the Timeline Feed, they can see events related to a user and content, open content referred to in events, comment and respond to issues or updates, and view threads.

The second view is Task Management which acts as an area for the user to manage the tasks they are associated with, as creator or if they were assigned by others. This view can be accessed through the tasks list on the left-side navigation menu, and the user can filter by several tabs, including due (next 7 days, next 30 days or all-time), new and updated, as well as tasks assigned to them or tasks they have allocated to others.

This is an interactive comment section that brings content created in Yellowfin and external links together in one place so your dashboard consumers can engage in discussion and collaborate on insights. These streams are integrated with the Yellowfin Timeline Feed to help users keep up-to-date with posts made in a discussion by viewing the latest updates in their individual feed.

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Discussion Streams have to be created before your team can collaborate and discuss content, and this option is accessed through the create menu, where the user can set up an image to use for the stream, a name, description and tags for your stream image. There are three layouts to choose from to change how the stream is displayed in the timeline view. Users can configure the stream security to determine whether the stream is public or private (invited users only).

Yellowfin includes an Activity Stream where users can view and share comments, manage tasks and carry out discussion on dashboard content by clicking on the interactive activity button located on every dashboard, report, storyboard and Yellowfin Story. This collaboration function is not a typical feature of many BI platforms, so when it is available, it is recommended to familiarize your team with its extensibility to take full advantage of its sharing opportunities.

A comments system in Yellowfin allows all users to add comments to a discussion related to specific content such as dashboards, reports, storyboards, Yellowfin Stories. You can add attachments in addition to text to provide additional context to any discussion. Having this system directly integrated within the BI platform makes collaboration pervasive throughout the organization’s end-to-end analytics process. For discussing results of dashboard metrics in a more transparent and collaborative way, it’s an essential feature to take advantage of today.