Implementing planner

This article provides useful tips when implementing the Planner. Make sure to have read Planner before you continue with this article, as some concept are very specific to planner. 

Considerations before you start implementing

Make sure you think about the following areas and can have a clear answer to each of them, even if you can discard and say an area is not relevant. This will help guide your usage and setup of Planner and how to integrate it into your inriver solution

• What is the business value you want to realize by using planner?
  • What business problem you trying to solve/ improve?
• What defines a Plan, activity or campaign for you?
• What parts does this have?
  • Texts, descriptions, name, images/media, categorizations, activities, milestones, dates, statuses, links to products etc..

• What are the inputs/sources for this information?

  • Is all the information mastered/created in inriver or does parts come from other systems?

• What are the outputs, and how is that information sent/consumed?

  • E.g: Special campaign assortment of products sent to target channels, campaign info and media sent to print and or web. Etc…
• What does the lifecycle look like?

  • When is the information created?

  • Different statuses?

  • Is the same campaign/activity re-used or always new?

    • Is there a need to copy a whole campaign/activity/plan?
    • What parts are relevant &/ important/critical to copy?

Using filters

The advanced filter and grouping in the Gantt view in the Planner works with CVL fields on your entity. To get maximum filtering possibility, the entity fields need to be set up as a FieldType CVL.

Add a User field to the Planner entity so the users can filter on the planned activities that are related to their work. The individual users will also be able to save their own view to quickly get back to working with the individual parts that concern themselves.

Adding roles

Add roles to your entities to be able to filter activities by larger roles.

Building an extension

You can also build an Extension for the Planner. It can for example be used to:

• View all activities that start in a specific Year, Quarter, Month or Week.
• Save views that show all marketing campaigns during the first quarter of next year.
• See all product launches during the month of August.

Filtering information

• Add the CVL Year, Quarter, Month and Week (include CVL that contains information) and set the fields to read-only.
• Add the fields to the entity that has to enable the filtering possibility.

Further reading

Setting up planner in inriver Control Center