The new "Cycle" framework for i-Dialogue is quite addictive. Being 100% AJAX-based, all aspects of Cycle applications are extremely responsive and only update the portions of the screen being updated (as opposed to traditional multi-page websites. That seems so 1999 now
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Also new to Cycle is inline configuration management. It's no longer required to go to separate setting pages to configure an application. Users with administrative permissions will see various links "inline" with application they are using.
Cycle applications have the following administrative and configuration options: Statistics, Permissions, Configuration, Run Tests. Run Tests is currently only available to Admins while in beta, but may remain visible in the future.
- Statistics provides an integrated reporting dashboard into each application. I'm really excited about this feature since it leverages a data warehouse I developed years ago, which has largely gone unused in our Salesforce integrated portals. The data warehouse captures nightly measures for time-series analysis of common Service and Support metrics using the Google charts API.
- Permissions is a simple role-based permissions matrix that requires no coding to grant/deny access to various features based on role.
- Configuration provides global settings applicable to all users, such as fields to display.
- Run Tests just provides simple red/green lights on the health of the application. This is particularly useful during installation since the tests will primarily validate that all dependencies exist, such as AppExchange packages or custom field configurations.
The video below is an inside peak at the event management module.