So I got stuck helping around the office with some of the development overflow. I am migrating a Notes/Domino client application to a web browser, which is always a chore if the original developer gave little thought to this eventuality.What I find myself doing is frequently saving the document the user is working on.
This […]
A customer application that was written a few years ago with ASP/VBScript had been migrated from an Access front end. The basic structure is ‘main entity’ with multiple ‘child entities’ and Access is good at working with data in this fashion. All you have to do is split the screen with the main entity on […]
When you are talking about portals, you will find it hard to steer clear of the topic of XML. Whether it is plain old XML/RPC calls or SOAP, a well architected portal will rely heavily on applications hosting there own logic and exposing this logic with XML. I recently have been working with […]
Just saw an article on slashDot news site highlighting how far the National Weather Service has come into the new millenium. It mentions the NWS’ XML offerings for forecasts and current conditions.
It is rare for me, but it feels good to be ahead of the curve.
Of all the portals I have done, the most common (and frequently the most used) application is the employee phone directory. In every implementation, it has worked the same where users type in the first few letters of an employees last name - click submit - and get results. This process involves refreshing the portal […]
Found a nice little wizard in Visio 2003 (not sure about previous versions) that will create an org chart from a text file. In a previous post, I mentioned the difficulties arising from trying to create an Org Chart portlet that can meet the demands of the office print-aholics. With the Visio option, […]
So, however you display the org chart in your portal, you will need to get things right in the back end or suffer the constant “massaging” of your data.
A common approach is to have a field in every employees record with the value of the employees managers name, and/or a field with the managers […]
Another popular portal application I have seen is weather information. Not only current conditions, but forecasts too. Now weather.com offers a JavaScript solution where you can place a predesigned block on your portal with current and forecast conditions, but this has two drawbacks.
First, the script is executed every time the wrapper […]
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 […]
The NNg has an interesting report out that highlights some of the pitfalls and planning points that a company should know when creating a portal. An interesting section was which apps/tools were common in succesful portals. Some of these are a little vague, but nonetheless they point out that the old “HR Forms/About Us” portals […]