Connected Tables vs. Cross-App Relationships vs. Automations
My company is currently building out a new set of apps to transition into over the next 30 days.
We've been running in the same application for roughly 6 years, and it has been great to us, but it has also been a learning process. After some research, we've decided to transition to a multi-app setup to address security concerns with many of our third-party vendors, and to address the performance issues we've seen by having an excessive amount of formula fields and relationships in one app.
We have separated our apps by corporate department and are in the table-building stages currently. We have one central app dedicated to company-wide reporting and central data management for the important stuff, and five department apps for day-to-day processes.
I have seen a lot of conversation around connected tables and cross-app relationships here, but I'm wondering if Automations may be a more useful solution to some of our problems.
Right now, all of the department apps have connected tables pulling our Customers, Employees, and Companies from our central app. From there, each app has it's own tables for that teams needs (We are a contractor, so we have Inventory and appointment management in one, processing tasks and jurisdiction info in another, accounting data in another, etc). From there, each app will be sending data back to our central app for reporting purposes (how long it takes to complete tasks, big-picture accounting data, etc).
I'm having trouble identifying when to use a connected table to send the info, when to lookup the info in a relationship, and when to use an automation to update the info across apps.
I'm thinking we're likely going to use a combination of all 3, but I don't have a complete enough understanding of them to properly identify what will be best in each situation.
My only thought walking into it is that we will likely avoid relationships, because I suspect that will put us in the same performance issue we've been having in a single app. However, I also believe that intelligent structure design will solve this problem.
Long story short, what are the pros and cons of Connected Tables, Cross-App Relationships, and Automations in multi-app data transfer so that I can better design the foundation of our apps?
I understand that this is a huge question, so thank you in advance.
We've been running in the same application for roughly 6 years, and it has been great to us, but it has also been a learning process. After some research, we've decided to transition to a multi-app setup to address security concerns with many of our third-party vendors, and to address the performance issues we've seen by having an excessive amount of formula fields and relationships in one app.
We have separated our apps by corporate department and are in the table-building stages currently. We have one central app dedicated to company-wide reporting and central data management for the important stuff, and five department apps for day-to-day processes.
I have seen a lot of conversation around connected tables and cross-app relationships here, but I'm wondering if Automations may be a more useful solution to some of our problems.
Right now, all of the department apps have connected tables pulling our Customers, Employees, and Companies from our central app. From there, each app has it's own tables for that teams needs (We are a contractor, so we have Inventory and appointment management in one, processing tasks and jurisdiction info in another, accounting data in another, etc). From there, each app will be sending data back to our central app for reporting purposes (how long it takes to complete tasks, big-picture accounting data, etc).
I'm having trouble identifying when to use a connected table to send the info, when to lookup the info in a relationship, and when to use an automation to update the info across apps.
I'm thinking we're likely going to use a combination of all 3, but I don't have a complete enough understanding of them to properly identify what will be best in each situation.
My only thought walking into it is that we will likely avoid relationships, because I suspect that will put us in the same performance issue we've been having in a single app. However, I also believe that intelligent structure design will solve this problem.
Long story short, what are the pros and cons of Connected Tables, Cross-App Relationships, and Automations in multi-app data transfer so that I can better design the foundation of our apps?
I understand that this is a huge question, so thank you in advance.
