Navigation - Menu and Landing pages

Overview

VOSS Automate provides several tools for customizing the Portal experience to your requirements.

The advanced Admin Portal utilizes two key ways to provide users with the means to navigate around the system to key features:

• Configurable navigation menus (on the left of the screen)

• Configurable Home page - this is the page you see when logging on or when clicking the Home button

Related Topics

• Landing Pages
• Menu Layouts

Navigation Configuration Options

The table describes configuration options to enhance navigation:

Configuration	Description
Naming conventions for menus and landing page	Use naming conventions relevant to your users and organization. For example, use business-relevant names for admins, and technical terms only for advanced users.
Linking from menus	Links from menus are typically set up to the form/view or a list or to other system models that users need access to for various tasks.
Display policy	The display policy for views, or for when users choose an entity from a list view, which determines the form layout displayed to a user.
Configuration template (CFT)	If you’ve chosen a CFT, it is applied when a view is accessed from the menu item, or if the user clicks Add from a list view. The CFT can also define default fields (or read-only default values for read-only fields), as well as default values for fields that the CFT hides from view.
Fixed filters	Configured for a menu layout, and applied by default in the backend and thus not visible to a user.
Configurable filters	May be fully or partially defined for menu layouts pointing to lists. This filter provides an interim step between clicking a menu item or landing page, and opening a list view. A configurable filter launches a pop-up allowing a user to enter filter criteria relevant to the menu item. When the user chooses the criteria the list view displays based on the criteria. Users can view, modify, or delete configurable filters.

Note

See the Core Feature Guide for more information on navigation configuration options.

Navigation Strategies

It’s important that you provide efficient methods for users to navigate through the system and to access required functionality.

Ensure frequently used functionality is easy to reach for different types of users. Create menus and the landing page based on the requirements of different user roles, and review these requirements regularly to ensure the greatest efficiency and user experience.

The table outlines key efficiency outcomes for enhancing navigation and the user experience:

Goal	Description
Quick Access to tasks and searches	Populate landing pages with frequently used tasks and searches to provide access with one click, and the ability to easily return to quick access functionality via a Home icon. EXAMPLES: Access to top MACDs on landing pages, with appropriate FDPs and CFTs. See Feature Experience. Add saved searches with predefined filter criteria as landing page entries. For example, a saved search for the list of unregistered phones, linking to phones with criteria set to status starts with unregistered. Landing page entries with configurable search criteria, for example, to find a phone by user. This can be done with a landing page entry for Phone, and filter criteria set to ownerID. In this case, the user is prompted to provide the user name to find a phone. If you don’t have enough space on a landing page for all the frequently accessed tasks you wish to add, add these items to the menus.
Feature experience	Instead of creating one link to a feature that has many scenarios, you may want to include multiple menus or landing page entries to the same feature, but use different display policies, CFTs, and filter options for specific use cases. This can be a very simple way to create an experience of a feature for specific scenarios, and prevent relying on users to follow a procedure or enter specific information. EXAMPLES: Create a link to add SIP trunks as part of a regularly added 3rd party application integration. This can link to the SIP trunk device model, and use a display policy that shows only settings requiring user input (such as IP address and the port for the remote system). The CFT could predefine all other technical settings based on the scenario (for example, CSS, call presentation details, digit manipulation, and so on). Create lines for different scenarios. Use display policies to show only those fields that must have user input, while CFTs pre-populate settings based on the scenario. You can add menu items for line type A, or line type B, for example, to cover the various scenarios, and combine this with filters in the menus and landing pages to differentiate between line types in the list views. UCM feature management: UCM can be managed in VOSS Automate by accessing the device models directly. The API definition from Cisco drives the default device model layout, and may include field names and ordering that doesn’t align with the VOSS Automate Admin Portal experience. You can improve this display policies to impose your preferred order and field labels. Combine this with CFTs to predefine default values or to simplify user input requirements to reduce possible setup errors.