We are using Quicksight to build out a dashboard center for sharing dashboards to our external business partners/customers.
We have about 15 developers internally that are working on developing datasets, dashboards, and so on.
One thing we are finding very difficult is organization. As we build things, and then put them into a shared space, so that others can access them, everybody’s Dashboard, analysis, and Dataset screens become very cluttered. with everybody else’s items.
Has anybody found a good way to manage that? I’m thinking there’s probably something I need to ask our Admins to do, or something, but I’m not sure what the capabilities actually are.
If it’s important to see who is working on what, can each developer create their own shared folder and put their assets in it? Each developer should also share their folder with the other developers and give them viewer access.
With this setup, developers will be able to put assets in their shared folder only but they will be able to see and use assets created by other developers.
This has been a big issue for us as well. We have a lot of duplicate data sources now and managing assets is a bit of a challenges when they’re creating datasets from identical redundant data sources.
What we’ve done so far is manage all Shared Folder access through Groups instead of individual users. We create a shared folder for specific business units (e.g. Operations, Finance, Marketing, etc) and inside of those create subfolders for Analyses, Datasets, and Dashboards. For now, this is while we’re building our reporting repository. Once we rolled this out to users we’ll organize shared folders into DEV, STG, and PROD. PROD will contain all production dashboards that are shared with End-Users. Access will be controlled entirely by Groups so Marketing will only see the relevant shared Marketing folder with the allowed datasets, analyses, and dashboards.
The thing I think I find most challenging is the folder behavior is different from how folders work in most other contexts that users are familiar with. Folders are more like tags than true folders, so it takes a lot of work for developers to keep on top of it, and it’s a lot of like procedures and training headaches for me.
Other areas of our org are actually already moving away from QS as their solution, and I think these basic usability problems are a big reason.