Org Chart madness
In a previous post I detailed the Top Ten Intranet Portal applications as defined by the Nielson Norman Group. One of these apps is the corporate organization chart.
We are all familiar with the traditional org chart printed from Powerpoint for some executive cabinet meeting, and we are all familiar with why these are not appropriate for corporate portals: These charts change constantly, and static/old content in a portal prevents users from returning, and that is a slow death for a portal.
So enter the dynamic org chart. Besides the back-end technical hurdles that most companies need to get past in order to make this happen (I will post details on that soon), is the question of how to present the chart client-side.
I have used Java and Flash applets to do this, and they perform reasonably well and provide alot of benefits like being able to “slide” the chart past the boundries of the applet or page, and collapsing parts of the tree for readability. Unfortunately, if you do not have Java/Flash talent in house, companies will have to pay for a shrink-wrapped solution, or a contractor/consulting company to write it, which means paying for upgrades, etc.. Flash/Java also require browser plugins which not every company installs on their computers.
So what about CSS and DHTML? It has no plug-ins, and can perform most of the readability features. But then you have to work within the contstraints of the page width, and deal with cross browser issues.
Then there is the issue that I simply loathe…printing the chart. What do you do if the chart needs to be wider than the page? What about pagination of long/wide charts?
In the end, I think I’ll go with a CSS/DHTML solution BUT limit the number of levels a user can display on the page. That should solve issues around page width, and I can tweak it to provide a printable/one-page version. I’ll find some sort of specialized software to handle printing so the portal is not connected with that process.