What this is

Director Dashboard is a single home base for the Director's office — tasks, emails, projects, events, Box inbox, and disclosures tracking, all in one place. Everything saves to the cloud automatically and is shared with anyone who uses the dashboard.

Access & sign-in

The dashboard is private. You sign in with your Box account, and access is limited to an approved allowlist — only pre-approved accounts can get in; a Box account that isn't on the list is turned away. (The Contacts tab also has its own one-time access key on top of this — see Contacts below.)

Managing access (admin): the allowlist is the DIRDASH_ALLOWED_USERS environment variable on the dg-dirdash Netlify site (comma-separated Box login emails). Edit it and redeploy to add or remove someone. This is different from the Operations budget dashboard, where access is controlled by Box folder collaborators rather than an allowlist.

Tabs

• 🏠 Home — Tasks on the left (shared action items tagged ASAP / Routine / FYI; drag to reorder) and Emails on the right (follow-up messages from your Outlook Dashboard folder).
• Events — upcoming deadlines, conferences, and travel shown in two columns by year (current year left, next year right), with a mini calendar below the current-year column. Click + Add to create an event; check it off when done; use the ✈ badge to mark travel as booked.
• Projects — multi-step initiatives, each with notes and linked Box files.
• Inbox — live view of your Box project folder; loaded on first visit. Click ↻ to refresh.
• Disclosures — editable table of research grants, personal fees, travel, and equity relationships (see below).
• People — Contacts (your full Outlook directory, synced two-way), Directory (the Schaeffer staff, faculty & scholar directory), and Advisory Board (the AB roster, grouped by role — AB Member, Scientific Advisor, AB Staff; ex-officio members excluded). See the Contacts section below.
• 🔗 Links — quick links (Schaeffer, USC, Outlook, Communications, Developer, Personal) live in a sidebar on the right, visible on every tab. Toggle it with the Links button in the top bar (or the › in its header) to reclaim width.

Disclosures tab

Tracks Dr. Goldman's active disclosures with columns for Sponsor, Support type, Grant #, Expiration (date picker), and Notes. Click any cell to edit. Rows with a past expiration date are shaded red.

• Click Sponsor, Support, or Expiration column headers to sort. Support sorts alphabetically with Sponsor as a secondary sort.
• Click + Add or the + Add row link at the bottom to insert a new row.
• Click Save (turns orange when there are unsaved changes) to write the table to Box as disclosures-data.json.
• Click ⚡ Generate Summary to build a disclosure paragraph for a chosen window (12/24/36/48 months, all time, or custom).
• Header links: NIH RePORTER, NIH Policy on Acknowledgements, Dana NIH Grants, and Disclosures Folder open related Box and NIH resources.

Contacts

Under People ▸ Contacts — a card browser over your full Outlook contact list (3,300+), gated by a one-time access key. It's a two-way sync with Outlook: anything you change here — edit a contact, add one, delete one, or change its categories — pushes to your mailbox automatically (you'll see an "Outlook synced ✓" toast). New contacts are created in Outlook too.

Contacts you add directly in Outlook flow into DirDash automatically overnight (a nightly refresh, ~2 AM). To pull them in right away, click ↻ Refresh at the top of the list — the 📊 Counts "All contacts" row is a quick way to see if Outlook has any the dashboard hasn't picked up yet. Click 🕘 Recent to see additions and edits from the last 7 days (tagged new or edited, with when and who) and jump straight into editing any of them.

Categories — DirDash is the master, and Outlook mirrors what you set here:

• USC and ER — the only auto-applied categories, derived from the email domain (usc.edu, entityrisk.com).
• Companies, Services, Work, and Personal — set by hand (or kept from Outlook); none are auto-assigned. (Companies is no longer auto-added to company contacts.)

A contact can carry several categories at once. Use the All categories dropdown to filter, and 📊 Counts to compare each category's count in DirDash against live Outlook — a green ✓ means they match, with an (untagged) and All contacts total at the bottom.

Emails

Fed by a Power Automate flow that watches your Outlook Dashboard folder — move a message there and it appears here. Dismissing a card removes it from this panel only; the message stays in Outlook. Click ↻ Refresh to reload.

Links card

On the Home tab, below Emails. Quick-launch buttons organized by category:

• Schaeffer — Box, white papers (Papers), and the Operations budget dashboard.
• USC — Workday, Concur, Cayuse, and USC Libraries.
• Outlook — Mail (Dashboard folder), Calendar, and Contacts.
• Developer — GitHub and Netlify.
• Comms — Zoom and LinkedIn.

Handy tips

• Everything is shared — tasks, projects, events, and disclosures you edit are visible to everyone who uses the dashboard.
• The Inbox tab loads on first visit only; use ↻ to refresh without reloading the page.
• Copy as HTML or Save as PDF (top of this window) let you share this guide by email or print it.
• Press Esc or click outside this window to close it.