I'll leave this thread as a question for now just in case my gripes are addressed by RTFM or some other thing I may have missed. I see a ton of room for improvement in the UI and I am curious if others agree or if I am just crazy. This really focuses on the items list but it would apply to anywhere I have lists of information to deal with.
1. March boldly into the present and have an interface that adjusts to the screen real estate. I am boggled by the fact that I cannot stretch the interface and take advantage of my giant display that I forked out a bunch of cash on. 1024x768 was super fly back in the day but locking your ui into the lowest common denominator seems silly. I am not sure exactly what the dimensions are that it seems designed for but there is really no excuse for having all the text scrunched up. It is killing me right now that when I look at the date fields they read something like "03/17/201..." . I am sure the "4" was cut off because there is also a time displayed but it appears like the last number is just chopped off. My descriptions barely show anything. Nothing useful. This leads me to my next gripe.
2. Column resizing, reorder, and customizing. Another set of features that every present day piece of software should be able to support. Why can't I stretch or shrink columns? Add and remove columns? Reorder columns? If you are going to present me with a grid of information I want to be able to tweak it.
3. Sorting and filtering. We do have some sorting and filtering available but this can be much improved. I think the dynamic ops product did/does a much better job of this from what I can gather. In fact they do almost exactly what I want. If I am in the blueprint area I can filter and sort on pretty much every attribute in the list. Don't guess at what I want to sort and search on give me full featured capabilities. If all I get is a search box at least let me pick which fields I want to apply the search to.
4. Tagging. Is there anyway to use a custom property as a tag that the search box would generate a hit on? From what I can tell the search box includes the name, owner, and description. I want to apply tags that an end user can't modify but would apply to searches. If in the above mentioned sorting and filtering things like os type and version, source blueprint, memory, storage, # cpus, things like that were options that would likely address quite a bit of stuff but we have plenty of internal information that is gathered at deployment time and other things that might be modified post deployment that would be super handy to filter on.
5. Search the entire inventory. How would I search my entire inventory? So far as I can tell for each provisioned resource type I would need to conduct separate searches. As an admin I want to see all of the items a particular owner has. This would be very cumbersome if we had lots of resource types we were provisioning. Going back to the tagging thing I might want to tag a bunch of stuff across various resource types and I might want to see everything that got tagged with a particular value (like a charge number, department, or project).