Behind The Curtain ... continued

A few days back Sean gave us all a sneak peak of the Broadchoice Workspace. He also mentioned we're all very busy lately, and guess what ... the Broadchoice Workspace is not the only application we're working on. Today I'm going to introduce the Broadchoice Workspace Analytics platform.

The Broadchoice Workspace Analytics is designed to work together with ( but not exclusively ) the Broadchoice Workspace and will give you great insights on how users interact with the platform. It's a Flex based Adobe AIR application targeted for AIR 1.5 and makes extensive use of some of the new Flash Player 10 features. Unlike Web Analytics it's not so much focused on websites, but more on users and their activity. By running the two applications together you will get to know "What", "How", "Who" and "When" stuff is happening inside your group, company or association which will ultimately lead towards finding out "Why" stuff is happening.

As I mentioned the Broadchoice Workspace Analytics does not work exclusively with the Workspace. Thanks to some brilliant minds (Joe and Patrick) it will support any kind of platform imaginable and over time connectors and plugins will be released to support those third party platforms. As you can see on the screenshot below the application allows you to configure multiple accounts and configurations.

The Broadchoice Workspace Analytics application is somewhat different from a traditional Analytics application. The first thing you might notice is that we don't have the traditional left navigation area containing a list of reports, instead we want to offer a more intuitive way of browsing through data and replaced the left reports menu with a context sensitive panel. It does support favorites and quick links to specific reports, but in general the dashboard will always be your main entry point to start digging into the data. The main dashboard is actually more of a gateway than a real data dashboard, it invites you to pick one of our 4 main categories; Users, Interaction, Activity and Content.

"Users" will show you all kinds of user related information. Everything from simple user interactions to displaying inter-user relationships within your group or company is in there. It's also the place to find demographic information and user capability stats.

At first "Activity" and "Interaction" may seem like the same thing, but they're actually very different. "Activity" embodies the "When" and focuses more on the general platform activity. This category will feed you session information, trending and density reports. This is probably the closest thing to traditional Web Analytics. "Interaction" on the other hand is the "What" and is much more action and object focused. Because "What" is something that you as a platform manager define this category is highly customizable. Every platform has different objects a user interacts with which can be websites, forms, blogs, video players, text editors, rss readers, etc. The platform is designed to learn about these objects and to provide you with stats, trending and performance information.

Lastly the "Content" category will report on all content hosted on your platform. This is probably the most straight forward category to understand and will give you everything from simple stats like uploads, updates, popularity, etc to more advanced stuff like how specific content is found and which content users have trouble finding.

Those 4 categories don't stand on their own, you can jump from one category to another and cross-segment almost anything ... and we will try to make it fun to do so. The following screenshot is an example on how segmentation works, by making the charts interactive you simply drag stuff on there and the results are immediately reflected below.

Another important thing to mention is that we aim to make all reports highly configurable and customizable. "Spaces" is a concept that is very specific to the Broadchoice Workspace, but because a "Space" is merely an object with actions and properties attached to it we can define that object as a "Space" and use it in our reporting.

I hope you enjoyed this little sneak peak of the Broadchoice Workspace Analytics application and if I got you excited be sure to download the Workspaace product.

Cheers N