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. Sign in with your USC Microsoft account; you're let in if you're a member of the Schaeffer Inst Dir Office SharePoint site. To sign out, open Settings (the gear, top right) — Sign out is at the bottom. (The Contacts tab also has its own one-time access key on top of this — see Contacts below.)

Managing access (admin): add or remove people as members of the Schaeffer Inst Dir Office SharePoint site — the same site, and the same rule, as the Operations dashboard. A removed member loses DirDash within about 15 minutes.

Tabs

• 🏠 Home — Tasks on the left (shared action items tagged ASAP / Routine / FYI; ▲▼ to reorder). The list refreshes on its own every 15 seconds and whenever you return to the tab, so two people editing at once see each other's changes; ↻ Refresh pulls it immediately 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).
• Contacts — your full Outlook directory, synced two-way. The staff directory and the Advisory Board live in the Ops dashboard. 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. The panel is not a mirror of that folder: it only ever adds, so filing or deleting the message in Outlook leaves the card in place. Dismiss is the only way to clear a card, and it 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.