Kavi Help Center| Chapter 3. Familiarizing Yourself with Kavi Tools | ||
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Table of Contents
There are many ways to navigate Kavi-software-supported areas of your organization's website. You may use bookmarks, type a URL directly into your browser address field, use the links on a landing page or menu. Kavi Groups provides a list of groups that allows you to move quickly from one group to another. Administrators can also use breadcrumbs as a quick way to move up and down through different levels in the administrative tools hierarchy.
For new account holders, the main path is to log into the Member Area at https://www.example.org/members/user_tools/ (where www.example.org is the URL for your organization's website). This takes you to the My Account page, which presents an instant overview of the areas and tools that are available to you. You can use this page to navigate easily from one area to another, view the information in each area and familiarize yourself with tools by clicking links and possibly even reading the online help.
Most Company Representatives will see a link to their company's Company Roster. If you have been designated as the Primary Contact, you may also see a link to the My Company page. This page provides links to tools you can use to manage your company's information and representatives.
On the My Account page, you will see a link to the All Groups page. You will also see a link to the My Groups page if you are a member of any groups. You may be assigned to groups automatically, so this link may be present even if you haven't signed up for any groups yet. The My Groups page is a convenient way to get an overview of activities in all the groups to which you belong, and to navigate quickly between different groups. The All Groups page is a good way to get acquainted with the different groups and activities going on in your organization, and navigate to different groups if you want to know more or are interested in joining.
The My Account page also provides a link to the My Mailing Lists page, where you can view and manage all your mailing list subscriptions. My Mailing Lists displays all your current subscriptions, as well as other mailing lists for which you are eligible to subscribe. The mailing lists shown here don't include Group lists. You have to be a member of a group in order to be subscribed to its mailing list.
Many Kavi pages are designed to be bookmarked, and the instructions on the page often invite the account holder or administrator to bookmark the page for future reference. The Membership Status page is one of these. You will see this page when you apply for an account. This page is in the Public Area of the website, so that you can access it if even if your request for an account has not yet been granted. You can bookmark any page, but some bookmarks are more reliably persistent than others.
This technique is primarily useful to administrators and editors. Kavi applications use the same basic file structure, so once you know the structure, you can navigate from an Admin Area to a Super Admin area merely by appending /super to the URL. Editors use this same technique to access Kavi Edit tools.
Administrators may find that breadcrumbs are a handy way to return quickly to a main menu, especially in the Admin Area. For example, if you are managing companies and users in the Kavi Members Admin Area and need to go up to the Super Admin menu to review some configuration settings, you would click the link to the Super Admin menu at the bottom of the page (or type /super onto the end of the URL), then click the link for the configuration tool that has the information you need. You might have to go through a couple of steps to get to the exact information that you want to see. Since all you want to do is view the information you can either back out of the tool or go through and save without changing anything...or you could click on the Members Admin Tools breadcrumb to return instantly to the Admin Area menu. Note that Kavi breadcrumbs aren't true breadcrumbs, because they show where you are on the site rather than where you've been.
Most Kavi tools are composed of a series of forms presented as steps. Here is an introduction to the common elements found on many Kavi product forms and provide tips to help you become a power user.
Like all good rules, user interface guidelines are made to be broken. Consequently, not every tool on this Web site will look or behave exactly as described here. The information and tips provided here should get you familiar enough, however, to be successful with most online forms and to be ready to adapt to the few special cases.
Read the Instructions!
Most people don't read information on the Internet — they skim. This works quite well most of the time, but can get you into real trouble when you're performing complex tasks. This is especially true if you are an administrator, group chair or mailing list moderator.
Managing a standards organization's website is not easy. Kavi Workspace provides powerful tools for administrators. Many administrative activities generate automated email notifications, redefine a user's website access or impact system performance. This can be tricky stuff! The good news? All it normally takes to be successful is to slow down and read the instructions presented on the page, and refer to the help when in doubt.
Kavi Workspace user interfaces include descriptions that tells you what the tool does and instructions to help guide you through the tool. While you are getting familiar with these tools, taking the time to read the text on a page and checking in with the help whenever you are unsure or have questions can save you from many an unfortunate mishap.
Menus
There is a menu of links for every major set of tools. Each Kavi product will have one or more menu of links available to users with different privileges. For example, Kavi® Showcase has a menu for regular members, one for reports, one for administrators, and one for configuration.
Hidden Tools
Sometimes the tool you are looking for doesn't appear in the application menu. Many tool links are context-sensitive, meaning they only show up under certain circumstances. This is usually dependent on a combination of factors such as how the application is configured, your permissions, the state of an object that is being managed, etc. These context-sensitive tool links are displayed on the "Manage" pages under the appropriate circumstances. Certain buttons may have different labels depending on the circumstances. For example, a 'Deactivate' button is displayed when a user, company or template is inactive. If the user, company or template is inactive, the 'Activate' button is displayed.
Tooltips
Kavi products are chock-full of tooltips. A tooltip is displayed when you hover your mouse pointer over a link or live element on a webpage. If you hover over a tool link on a Kavi product menu, you will see a description of the page to which the link leads. If you hover over a column name in a table, you'll see the currently selected sort order.
Tooltips are used in a lot of other places besides menus: they show the full description of documents in Kavi® Groups, alternative text for images in Kavi Showcase, and all kinds of other interesting information.
Manage pages provide an overview of information about a selected subject, such as a user or company. They are commonly preceded by a search form to narrow the number of results displayed on the page. There are a number of options that you can use to sort or filter the information on a Manage page. This includes search features (filtering), live column headings (select primary sort criteria or reverse the sort order), and results per page (self-explanatory). Manage pages also provide links to tools used to manage the data presented on the page.
Kavi tool pages generally have labels on the left with entry boxes on the right. Required fields are flagged with an asterisk (*), and must be filled out before you can go to the next step. When you are done setting all required fields and any optional fields as appropriate, and are ready to proceed to the next step, you have to click a button. There is a life-saver Help button in the top right corner that, when clicked, will take you to help written specifically for the form you're using.
- Help Button
The help button launches a new window to the Kavi Help Center where you'll find help specific to the form you're on and additional concept help that explains the theories of operation and best-practices for each Kavi product. The Help Center includes tools to search through all the help for more information about a specific topic and, if all else fails, a form to send email to support staff.
- Progress Bar/Steps
The progress bar in the upper-right corner of the page shows you what steps you'll go through and where you are in the process. Most of the time, there is one form per step, but occasionally a step encompasses multiple forms. Use the progress bar to get a feel for where you are in a process, see the options that are coming up, and know when you are done.
- Page Name, Description, and Help Icon
The name of the current page and a brief description are at the top of every product page. This page name is the same on every step of the process. If you need to contact support for help with a specific page, it's handy to include the page name in your request to assist the support person in targeting your problem efficiently. Click the help icon to have the page help displayed. The name of the page help document usually matches the name of the tool or Manage page.
- Form Fields
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Form fields are typically arranged with the field labels on the left and the entry box on the right, as shown in the search form example. The field may display static information, or collect information from you through text fields where you enter textual data, checkboxes or radio buttons that you must click, or drop-down select lists. Required fields are marked with an asterisk and must be completed before you can proceed to the next step. Kavi Workspace may validate the values you've entered or selected to make sure the information conforms to an expected pattern. If it doesn't, a bright yellow message with an exclamation mark is displayed to highlight the unexpected value (the same icon is used a couple of paragraphs down in the help). The error message explains what data must be corrected so that the form can be submitted successfully. In some cases the message is just a warning that you are allowed to ignore and proceed if you wish.
Tabbing
You can use the Tab key on your keyboard to navigate Kavi forms. Using the Tab key to advance to the next field increases the speed with which you can complete each form and may save you a lot of time if you routinely complete many forms per day.
When you're done entering information into the first field on a form, press the tab key and the cursor jumps to the next field on the form. When you get to the final button in the bottom-right corner, press Return or Enter on your keyboard to submit the form.
Clickable Area
When a form displays multiple selectable options, you can usually click anywhere on the text that applies to this option to select the option. For example, the options on a 'Select' form are printed in horizontal rows that stretch across the width of the page. You can click on any text in the row to select that option, so you do not have to click exactly in the middle of the little checkbox or radio button.
- Buttons
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For most Kavi products, the button to submit the form and proceed to the next step is on the right and the button to cancel is on the left. The Cancel button allows you to exit the form without saving your information and return to the nearest menu. The Back button takes you to the previous step or form where you can review or edit your data or selections. The submit button (which may be labeled 'Save' or 'Continue, etc.) captures information entered into this form and sends it to the next step.
You must click the submit button to save your work!
If you're relatively new to working with forms on the Internet, you may expect any information you enter to be automatically saved, just as it might be when working with a word processor or sending email. Website software doesn't work that way. When you're entering information online, you have to click a button to send the information that you've entered to the website's databases. If you're working with a multi-step tool, you need to click the button at the bottom of each and every form until you reach a form that says "Done" or "Success" at the top. Once you reach the Done step, you can safely click anywhere or even close out of your browser, knowing your information has been saved.
Kavi products are full of data: information about your organization's members, documents, calendars and mailing list message archives can all be stored in the website's databases. Kavi products employ a standard way of presenting large lists of information designed to make it easy for you to quickly find and work with the information you need.
Rosters, reports, search results and other lists of information are presented in tabular lists with one item per row. A tabular list means a list that is displayed in a table format, and these lists look very similar to rows of information in a spreadsheet table when displayed online. Column names in the top row describe the information shown in the rows below, and can often be clicked to sort the information by the values in the selected column. If you can select an item in the list, or if there are links to tools used to manage this item, links or clickable checkboxes or radio buttons usually appear in the last column on the right.
Long lists are commonly broken into several pages, so when you first view a list you may be viewing only the first page. This helps display the list more quickly, since the software doesn't have to wait for the entire list before displaying the first page of results. Look for the 'Results per page' option at the top and bottom of the list, along with a series of numbers representing the available pages, which you may click to jump to another page of results. Changing the sort order, or filtering the results, changes which items are shown on each page.
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| Chapter 2. Your Website Access |  |
Chapter 4. Roles and Responsibilities |