This is a tour of Blue Link’s user-friendly system interface! Recent new features include a customizable homepage, global navigation, convenient dashboard toolbar and more!
Transcription
0:05-0:20 In this video, you will get an overview of Blue Link’s new user interface. The new user interface has three main components: the homepage, global navigation, and a dashboard toolbar.
0:20-0:30 Now the Home page is the first thing you will see typically after you log in. It's a web browser and it will navigate to a URL that is being defined by the system master or alternatively what you’ve overwritten as your individual User Preference.
0:30-0:50 You can choose from a list of URLs that are available to you based on what has been made available company-wide and your own individual group and user permissions.
You can select any one of these as your default homepage and you can also turn off your homepage altogether.
0:50-1:00 The second component: Global navigation is a static menu on the left side. You’ll only see the modules and options to which you have permission.
1:00-1:10 Pinned items replace the old notion of favorites and by default always expanded so you can have a single click access to the screens that you're most likely to use on regular basis.
1:10-1:30 It is easy to add or remove items tool from the pinned list. You can change the sequence in which they display, and you have up to 10 items to pin. navigating to menu items that are not on your pinned list can be achieved in one of two ways. One way is to expand the module under which it appears. So, for example if we're looking for the General Journal screen, we could click on General Ledger expanded it, and then click on General Journal.
1:30-1:40 While we’re in this menu option, I should point out that the vertical scrollbar has appeared because we’ve expanded the menu beyond what can be displayed.
1:40-2:05 Another and perhaps more interesting way of navigating to individual menu options is to type any part of the name of the menu option in the search bar. Type in JOUR .., and any menu option that contains that string or those sequence of letters in any part of the menu option name will display as long as you have permission to see them. You can also use wildcards in this search bar.
2:05-2:20 Global navigation is collapsible, so if you wanted to reclaim more real estate on the main part of your screen for data entry or on-screen inquiries, you can simply click on the Chevron, and it will collapse the global navigation down to the left.
2:20-2:35 You will notice that the pinned items still remain and as you hover over any of the numbers, you will see the name of that menu option displaying and the search is still available although obviously if you click on the search, it will re-expand the screen so that you can actually use the search menu in a meaningful manner.
2:35-3:15 You can manually resize the Global Navigation, as wide as we like actually. Now another useful navigation element is the quick find toolbar at the bottom of the screen which allows us to jump directly if we know the reference number to things like quotes or sales orders or invoices, but we can also jump to individuals to customers to inventory items if we know all or part of the code or name. So, if I type P for example into the customer box in the quick find toolbar it’ll show me that I actually have two customers with that word in the name and I can select which one if I enter in an ambiguous string, it’ll actually open up the specific customer record.
3:15-3:30 The next element we’ll look at is the dashboard toolbar located towards the top right. There are a number of very useful buttons here. So, it turns out that I have opened several other screens, but they are all hidden behind the home screen, so if I actually minimize the home screen, you'll notice a number of other windows open.
3:30-4:00 Now we can obviously switch and rotate between these windows by clicking on their headers if we can find them, but the windows tool allows us to get a list of all the currently open windows and then to select which window we'd like to work on, simply by clicking on it and rotating between them in this particular manner. So, it's a really (really) useful tool if you do have a number of windows and of course, you may have ten or fifteen windows open, this is an easy way to navigate between them.
4:00-4:20 The Next button we look at on the dashboard toolbar is the Help button. When you click on this button it opens up in a separate browser; full access to Blue Link’s entire online help and knowledge base which includes a mix of articles, how-to procedural documentation, and video content.
4:20-4:35 Now another useful tool is the user preferences so as you pull down the username and unlocked in-as admin that’s why I’m seeing the word admin there, you can click on user preferences to open the individual user preferences screen which allows you to control three different aspects of your experience within Blue Link.
4:35-4:55 On the left-hand side, you can control the sequence of your pinned items by moving any of the pinned items in the list up or down. You can control whether or not to show the home page and as we said before, select which of the appropriate URLs that you have permission to would be your preferred default homepage if you do leave it switched on
4:55-5:30 And finally, you can control the color scheme of both the left navigation and the dashboard toolbar, and this is useful if for example in a multi-company situation where you're going to have two or three companies, open switch between them and you'll have the color cue as to which company you're in. So, it’s simply a matter of changing the back color or the back color and the fall color whichever you prefer. So, if we pick for example orange then we are going to have this extremely interesting orange. Now you’ll notice the system was intelligent enough to realize that a white font on the orange background won’t work so it turned this into a black font accordingly.
5:30-5:45 and we can return to the default color in any stage by clicking on the reset to default color and it will reinstate our menu color as blue and a full color of white.
