NethServer is small-medium enterprise oriented and in organizations of this size there isn’t an IT manager, most of times we have to give instruction to the owner and/or a person that is skilled enough to do some task on the server but they aren’t IT worker and often (or always) they cannot understand with ease reports or admin dashboard.
For what I have seen in the last years more and more customers are asking for an interface that can give them information on the fly, at glance.
Someone is apprehensive someone else is ansious but almost all would like to see and understand what happen to their server.
What if there was a dashboard for end user?
At the end of this post you will find a sketch of my NethServer End User Dashboard, it want to be just a starting point but what I have drawn is a collection of what customers have really asked to me so far.
Better of many words I think.
There are many obstacles on the way many of which with security and/or privacy issues but I think that this is a challenge the community can win.
@sitz this is a fantastic idea! Hos about making the current dashboard customizable where you can have a tick to make some info public and/or choose to publish certain info to certain people in the organization? This would be definitely relevant for the ICT monitoring components from the SME page. Something that would be loved is inventory of HW and software on clients and off course licensing info if there is any.
This just gave me another idea why not moving this type of information that can be used for none admins to an intranet page for SME’s? That would make this idea unlimited customizable without compromising the servers core dashboard? On the other hand i prefer simplicity and maintaining to dashboards is usually ineffective?
i vote definitely for 1 customizable dashboard if possible.
I think that the better way is try to reuse existent code where possible and create just what miss. As I have written I would like a dashboard for non admins be accessible without password but for some information there are privacy/security issue. So you gave me a good hint about customization: system administrator could create one o more dashboard one just for monitoring purposes (password free) and a second one for inspection of non admins (eg. enterprise owner need to check for an incoming email or print the FAX journal).
Are you talking about something like this?
Yes roadmap I have into my mind there is also an Intranet page but this is another thing.
I’m quite agree with you.
Do you want to contribute in The NethServer End User Dashboard project?
The reason I mention that it might have been good to put the public and none public dashboards to separate page like an intranet is because if you decentralize the “all in one” Nethserver solution the dashboards will be split up to every server installation and that is ineffective in my opinion but it makes perfectly sense if you only have one server. I also assume you are primarily aiming towards the SME clients in this feature solution?
Take the SME version in consideration and assume that every version is installed on an separated server then it would be very powerful to have a good customizable dashboard in place that takes a decentralized installation of Nethserver in consideration? For this to work we need to have a good ldap integration in place between the version.
Does it make sense to have two different Dashboard suggestion? One fore All in one server solution and one for SME? The SME dashboard would fit into ICT Monitoring Role as an separated module?
Exactly @malvank , for what is my personal experience SME customers in 99% of cases are in one of these two situations:
Scenario A - just one machine with NethServer installed with server and firewall roles
Scenario B - two machines both with NethServer installed one with firewall role and one with server role
So the NethServer End User Dashboad should be a monitor tool for a non admin user (the owner or a manager) to monitor some tasks and/or situation to be proactive, or to be indipendent when he/she wants to have a report on demand o check for an incoming email.
I agree that SMB “Small medium Businesses” are in the scenario that you describe but not necessary SME “Small medium Enterprises”. The difference for me is that SMB is a small business more like home users and SME are small businesses with needs like enterprises. The scenarios i have are the SME can have 2-3 satellite sites and they have development environments with high security demands. They can easily have 1-2 server in DMZ and 2-3 server on the lan. In those scenarios it would be very good if the Dashboard would collect information from all servers.
I would say the Dashboard solution should be defined after the research (if not already done) by defining what an average SME installation looks like? After that is done it’s much easier do decide if there should be 1 or 2 solutions for the dashboard? In my opinion there should only be 1 solution to maintain and it has to be able to scale to the amount of servers that is defined from the SME environment because this will solve the need for the community server solution as well.
I like this, do you think that could be an improvement of the actual Dashboard? Or an alternative one?
That’s not a user Dashboard, imho it’s an administrator dashboard, like existent, but with a lot of additional and aggregate data.
Do you agree?
Show all of this data without any auth I don’t think it’s a good idea
I think a dashboard could be useful for all users. Currently users need to enter example.com/server-manager to change their password and example.com/sogo to access their groupware. It would be nice if https://example.com launched a logon that would have all the user accessible modules listed. So a non-administrator would go to the company website and be presented with a logon prompt. After authenticating the user would get a menu of tasks based on the user’s rights. Example below. Welcome to the ABC Company Webpage
Check E-mail
Manage Profile
Access your files
Send a Fax
What do you think to that idea, extend the actual dashboard with your suggestions and give to a user (your non-administrator) the permission to see just such dashboard?
