"Why does EDM show all these things that show up on the home screen that we never access and don't know what they do?"
In the past couple months I have been asked the same question by a few clients. To be honest, I didn't even know what they were talking about to begin with. What extra "things"? Then it hit me, they were talking about the cards to take them to Node Types, Hierarchy Sets, Node Sets, etc.. I never thought of them as items that should be hidden... but I almost exclusively live in the world of an Administrator where I use these to build and configure EDM everyday.
My initial answer and thoughts were that they shouldn't see these being only a user in EDM. Quickly I could see that I was incorrect. When logging into EDM as a data steward these items were still openly displayed and accessible. What could I do with them? Well, not much. I could open and inspect all of the objects but I could not edit or configure them. And in some cases like expressions, I could not inspects and see them as I needed edit rights to get to the expressions. Again in my mind I asked.. What could I do with these? The answer that came I came up was... Nothing. I could not do anything with these, they gave me out of context information. If I was not able to edit or understand how to interpret or edit them, these did nothing for me.
Next logical thought was... How can I hide these from the data stewards so they don't have to see them and they can have a clear path to what is relevant in EDM to manage metadata from a data steward perspective. Again, came to a road block in my mind... "Are there no settings to hide these 'Admin' only objects?" ... Sadly EDM does not have any features as of yet to do this.
I reached out to others in the community and they all agreed, EDM shows these to all users and there was nothing that can be done within EDM to prevent it.
My next thought was there should be a method to hide these unnecessary admin items and only give the users a clear path to navigate. So, I went to the EDM ideas lab to see if someone has already suggested this type of feature in EDM. I did not find anything so I posted my idea and proceeded to wait to see what if any actions could be done to get this added to EDM.
Here is a link to my Idea Lab post if you want to provide some feedback to Oracle: Hide tiles not used by 'users'
As part of the feedback I got from the community on my above idea, I was introduced to an EPM feature by Nate Keller, a former co-worker of mine from about a decade ago. In Nate's comments he referred the the Navigation flows that can be setup with in an FCC or Planning EPM instance and that these flows could also be used to isolate a "Navigation" or workflow for EDM.
It took me a week or so to get access to a Planning EPM pod where I could test this out.
After a brief overview on how navigation flows work in EPM ( I had never used or seen them before), I spent 30 minutes or so and I had a working EDM flow where only the cards needed for the EDM data steward were being displayed.
While this is very promising, there are many, many questions I still have to make this truly usable for the data stewards.
Let me know your thoughts on this and if you have seen or used this feature for EDM.
SP
