In the spirit of "Tis better to give than receive" comes the next blog on cool Viewpoint features, that being the ability to "share" a portlet. The shared portlets feature captures a customized version of a portlet and allows it to be shared as a distinct portlet for use by other Viewpoint users. It will appear in the admin menus as its own portlet including the same permissions options as the original portlet it was derived from. One may ask how does it work? And why would one use it?

After a spectacular Teradata Partners Conference, I'm back to do another cool Viewpoint features blog. I want to start out on this one with a little background on how this feature came about. In our first two Viewpoint releases, we focused on Teradata Management and Teradata Self Service aspects. Our customer base increased and with that, so did the importance of Viewpoint in the Teradata customer infrastructure. With that increased base and importance, it became clear that we needed to improve on the management aspects of the Viewpoint Appliance itself.

This is the second in the series of blogs regarding cool features and tidbits within Teradata Viewpoint. Today's discussion is going to focus on SQL Scratchpad, a new Self Service portlet released with Viewpoint 13.0.1 in June 2009. SQL Scratchpad is the most significant addition to the Self Service aspect of Viewpoint since the "My Queries" portlet release in August 2008. SQL Scratchpad enables Teradata users in submitting ad-hoc SQL, getting result sets, and managing queries through a Viewpoint portlet.

As the Product Manager for Viewpoint, I have the distinct pleasure of discussing, presenting, and demonstrating the extensive feature content to account teams, partners, and customers. My thanks goes out to the Viewpoint Engineering team in providing lots for me to talk about ... And learn. So this is the start of a series of blogs regarding cool features and tidbits I've found and continue to discover within Viewpoint.