Apps is a powerful feature in Spider Impact that allows administrators to build curated, branded experiences for specific tasks. Apps enable streamlined workflows and customized interfaces by consolidating data collection, reporting, and operational tools into a single, integrated environment.
Key Benefits of Apps:
- Task-Specific Experiences: Create tailored applications for different departments or use cases, such as sales tracking, customer service, or project management.
- Centralized Data and User Management: Apps leverage Spider Impact's existing permissions architecture, ensuring secure and seamless data access.
- Standalone Access: Apps can be accessed independently of the main Impact UI, allowing users to interact with them via a dedicated URL.
Viewing and Accessing Apps
Apps provide a standalone experience separate from traditional Impact sections. When you navigate to an App's view tab, you'll see a single "Open App" button that launches the App in a new browser tab. Each App has its own dedicated URL, allowing you to create browser bookmarks for direct access.
Apps require you to log in, and they share a security model with Spider Impact. You can only see data in Apps that you can already see in Impact.
After logging in, you'll encounter a customized interface designed specifically for its purpose. Apps are built from existing Impact screens like Forms, Dashboards, and Reports. For example, this App has four sections. This "All Customers" section is a multi-page form that starts with a list of all customers.
When you click the "Edit Customer" link for a customer, you're taken to the customer details page where you can see a history of sales for that customer and edit the customer's contact information.
In this example, the "Reports" section allows you to choose between several dashboards, each displaying various sales data visualizations.
Drilling Down Inside an App
When you click something in an App that drills down to another screen, such as a dashboard widget or a scorecard item in a report, the App shows it in the same tab whenever one of its sections can show that item. A section can show an item when it's set to show that single item, or to show every item of that type from the item's organization. For example, a section showing “Every Dashboard from an Organization” for the Sales organization can show any Sales dashboard you drill down to.
If none of the App's sections can show the item, it opens in the full application in a new browser tab.
This works everywhere you can drill down in an App, including dashboard widgets, scorecard items in reports, chart series, dataset and report drilldowns, and search results.
Exporting from an App
The “Send To” button works inside Apps, so you can print or export the section you're looking at. Depending on what the section shows, you can send it to a printer, email, Word, PowerPoint, PDF, or a PNG image. To keep Apps focused, the “Briefing” and sharing options aren't offered inside an App, and the other toolbar buttons, such as bookmarks, are hidden.
Creating and Managing Apps
Like every section in Spider Impact, Apps reside in organizations and follow the standard Spider Impact permission model. This means you can access every app in your viewable organizations. The "Modify Apps" permission allows administrators to configure and manage Apps in their viewable organizations.
The Edit tab within the Apps section allows administrators to manage App settings. Here, the app itself is selected, and you can set the app's name, URL, and description.
Like editing Form Pages, when you edit an App, all its sections appear underneath it. Here we've selected the "All Customers" section and we can see that this App Section shows a single Form.
When you select the "Reports" section, you can see that it's showing every dashboard from an organization.
Because Apps use Spider Impact's existing permissions, if a user can't see a page inside of Spider Impact and that page is being used for an App's section, that section will be hidden for them inside of the App. This allows you to create apps with sections that only appear for some users.