Customising the dashboard

[markrogers]

We recently installed Alfresco for someone to play with; we don't know it very well ourselves as end users. They've come back to me with the following question:

I am finding the Alfresco site a little un-user friendly when trying to access the documents I have managed to customise the dashboard so “My Sites” are one of the first things I see but before I invite clients to see it, I would like to make sure it is easier enough for them to use.

If it is possible can you please find out if we can customise their dashboards so the first thing they see is the list of documents.

If someone can point me at the relevant documentation I can probably work this out myself but I'm not sure where to start!

[tvaughan77]

You can control what the default "home screen" is for a user by editing ./tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/web-client-config.xml and tweaking this attribute:

        
         <!– The default location to display when the browse screen is first shown –>
         <!– This value should be one of 'myalfresco', 'userhome', 'companyhome' or 'guesthome' –>
         <initial-location>myalfresco</initial-location>
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You can also customize what their "myalfresco" space looks like by clicking the "customize" button in the top-right of their page and playing with the different portlets in different configurations until you find one that you think meets your usability concerns.

[markrogers]

Thanks for this. I have been experimenting, and I think the key thing has been to make sure the end user only has access to one site and therefore gets taken straight to that site without having to select it, but a documents dashlet might be a nice-to-have? I think I'm going to remove a lot of things from the dash so that it's less cluttered for the casual user.