Managing documents and working together in the digital workplace: Documentum, M-Files, Alfresco, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and web platforms. Our consultants write about content management, collaboration, integration and the compliance questions that come with them.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve addressed philosophical questions related to enterprise content management (ECM), such as “What should be done?” and “Why?” Now, it’s time to focus on the “how.” When discussing user adoption of M-Files, the conversation often centers on training, change management, and automation. While these aspects are important, another factor immediately impacts the user experience: the…
In this blog post, I will outline the steps required to enable and configure the M-Files Outlook Pro add-in. This includes configuring Microsoft Outlook rules to automate email handling. It took me some time to configure the rules, as they were not working as I expected. I hope this blog helps others save time. Installation The installation is very straight…
After several posts of theory, it’s time to build something. In this post, I will walk you through a Visual Designer tutorial to create a complete Contracts dashboard on the M-Files Sample Vault. Therefore, no JSON editing is required at all. The Visual Designer is the primary authoring path for most administrators. Power users who prefer hand-editing JSON can write…
So far in this series I have covered what an end user sees, the anatomy of a dashboard definition, the seven widget types (scalar, trend, and the rest), the query side, including the aggregations. Time to look at the surface where the administrator actually spends time: the Dashboard tab in M-Files Admin. This is also where the Visual Designer lives.…
In IT, it is essential to stay up to date, as technology evolves at an ever-accelerating pace. As consultants, we constantly face new challenges, many of which extend beyond purely technical matters, while adapting to diverse contexts and audiences. That’s what makes this profession so exciting! At dbi services, knowledge sharing is deeply embedded in our culture. Over the past…
In the previous post, I walked through the query side of the dashboard JSON: objectType, class, filters, date tokens. What I deliberately left out was the aggregation block, because it deserves its own post. The aggregation is what transforms the set of matching objects into a value the widget can render. There are five aggregation types, six reducers, and one…
In the previous posts of this series, I covered the anatomy of a dashboard definition and the seven widget types (KPI & gauge, line & area, donut, bar & table) the engine supports, as of now. In this one, we will go through the Business Dashboard queries, i.e. the query section that I pretty much ignores so far. It is…
As You know, I will talk about ECM projects again. This time we will focus on what comes after. When everything was delivered on time and within the budget. Yep it’s not fiction, it happens really 🙂 Every KPI is green! At the last steering committee meeting, congratulations were in order. A slide presentation highlighted the project’s key milestones, its…
This is the third and final widget post of the series. The previous two covered scalar widgets (Post 4a) and trend widgets (Post 4b). What is left is the distribution and tabular widgets: donut, bar, and table. The grouping is loose but useful: donut and bar answer questions like “how does my population break down into categories?”, while table can…
This is the second widget post of the series, focused on the two trend widgets: line and area. The previous one covered scalar widgets (Post 4a). Since these two widgets are closely related, it made sense to bundle them together in the same post. Both surface a single value per category or per time bucket, plotted across a horizontal axis.…
In my fifteen-plus years working in the ECM world, I have seen the promise of a high ROI (return on investment) numerous times. Faster processes, fewer errors, reduced storage, and improved compliance can all be quantified and multiplied across the organization to create a compelling business case. The benefit is real; otherwise, I would have moved on to something more…
This is the first widget-specific post of the series. As a reminder, the previous post mapped the anatomy of a dashboard definition. From here on, I go widget by widget. I have grouped the seven widget types into three families: The reason kpiNumber and gauge sit together is that they accept exactly the same aggregation type (summary) and they share…
