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Increase Productivity by Simplifying the User Interface for your users

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Abstract

Increase Productivity by Simplifying the User Interface for your users

Body

A best practice of User Interface design is to only show the information that a particular user cares about. To quote from Jakob Nielsen:

"Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility."
Showing only the information that your users care about can greatly increase their productivity and reduce your support and administrative costs. For example, you might want the approvers of your work orders to only see the main Work Order tab of the Work Order Tracking application and not be distracted by any of the other tabs. It's very easy in Maximo to hide a section or tab of an application for a security group using signature options. 

Here are the steps you need to follow:
Create a new Signature Option within this application for these "advanced" tabs. 
  • Go to the Application Designer application and select the WOTRACK application.
  • From the Select Action menu click Add/Modify Signature Options.
  • Click new row and add a new Option called "XXADVTAB" with description "Advanced View".  Click OK to close the dialog.

 
Associate this Signature Option with the controls that you wish to hide for certain security groups.
  • Click on the Plans tab in the application designer.  Popup the properties pane for this tab, go to the Advanced tab, and set Signature Option to "XXADVTAB" and Sig Option Data Source Id to "MAINRECORD".

  • Repeat this step for each of the tabs that you want to hide from the approvers of your work orders.  This same approach can be used for any other hiding any other type of widget within the user interface: sections, tables, fields or buttons.
  • Now save the application.
Grant security permissions to the Security Groups that should see these controls.
  • Now go to the Security->Security Groups application.  Select each of the security groups that you want to see these Advanced tabs, filter on the Work Order Tracking application and find the "Advanced View" option in the table at the bottom.  This text should match the description of the Signature Option you created in the first step.  Grant them permission to this security option by clicking the checkbox under the Grant Access? column in the table.  Leave the Condition field blank.
 

If you log in as one of the users in the "Approver" group, the Plans tab should be hidden from them.  Log in as one of the users in the groups that you granted this Advanced View security permission and you should see the Plans tab.


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ibm11133829

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