Your first live app

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The starting point

Say you work in marketing at a mid-sized company. Every Monday, you collect news about three competitors by hand. You paste it into a slide and email it to the team. That takes your whole morning. You want a link your team can open at any time, with the latest figures. That is exactly what a live app is for.

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Step 1: You make a request

You open the Console, go to Builds and click Ask for a live app. You fill in the dialog in your own words:

What should it be called? Competitor radar What is it for? Every Monday my team wants to see what our three main competitors did last week: news, product launches, campaigns. We use it to decide what to respond to.

You choose Standard, check the cost estimate and click Start the build.

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Step 2: The preview

Alex builds the dashboard. Meanwhile, you see your request on the Builds page. When it shows Ready for you, you click Open preview. There is no real data yet. The preview therefore shows sample figures. A notice at the top says that some figures are placeholders. You like the layout. Only the campaigns section is too small. You click Reject and write:

Please make the campaigns section as large as the news section.

With Order another round, Alex rebuilds the dashboard and fixes the point. You open the new preview and are happy with it.

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Step 3: Approve and put live

You click Approve and put live. The Console points out that from now on, the weekly refreshes run through your account and consume credits on every run. You confirm. The Console first opens the dashboard the way readers see it. Every section shows its data. The dashboard goes live and now has its fixed link. In the Access tab, you click Copy viewer link and copy the password. You send both to your team in two separate messages. See Access: link and password.

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Step 4: The first weekly refresh

On Monday, Hannah collects the week’s news about the three competitors and delivers it. You do nothing. Your team opens the same link and sees the new week next to the last one. Hannah follows the written rules of the data area. This keeps the data comparable from week to week. See Rules, method and lists.

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Step 5: A proposal

After a run, you receive an email as the person responsible (owner) with a new proposal. In the Setup tab, you open Open proposals and read:

Hannah proposes: add another trade magazine of the industry as a source. Two competitors announced product launches there first this month.

You click Accept. From the next run, Hannah also reads this magazine.

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Step 6: A display error

One morning, you receive this email:

Subject: Incident: dashboard “Competitor radar” is not fully displayed During today’s daily check, a program error occurred in the dashboard. At least one section is not displayed. The data itself is fine.

The email tells you that the data is fine and what to do. You open the dashboard’s page. Under Needs your attention, you see the alert with the button Order a fix. You click it, check the cost estimate and confirm. Alex builds the fix as a preview. You approve it, and the section is back. Same link, no new message to your team. See When something goes wrong.

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Step 7: A small change

A month later, you want a fourth competitor. You click Ask for a change and write:

Please add Contoso as a fourth competitor.

Alex builds the change as a preview. The current dashboard keeps running for your team until you approve. Then the same link shows the new version.

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What to take away

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What you can do next