OpenGrid Intranet
Since I built this Intranet from scratch at the corporate level, I was able
to avoid the pitfalls that limited me on the WebTV
Customer Service Intranet. The various departments wanted to be able to
post files in a variety of file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc), so I
again chose to use frames to embed the document being viewed in a consistent
user interface.
But since many users like to email each other links to specific documents
on the Intranet, the ability to bookmark pages without it defaulting back to
the original frames page was a priority. To solve this problem, I made the
top-level frames page an ASP script that would dynamically set the navigation
tabs and content file based on intuitive Section and File variables that were
passed in the query string. Thus, each link on the site would reload the same
top-level index file, but with a different content page being loaded into the
main frame so that both the browser's bookmarking functionality and the users'
habit of copy/pasting links into emails would maintain the proper information.
This also made it trivial to incorporate content and applications from external
URLs into the Intranet UI.
In addition to building the overall site architecture, I also designated
the majority of the site's hierarchy, a decent portion of the content, and
the following dynamic tools dedicated to improving work flow:
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Employee Contact List
By putting the employee contact list into a database, I removed the
dependence upon a single person to maintain all of the information,
and made it simple for each user to update their own contact info.
In addition to the traditional email, phone and cell phone numbers,
this database also supported entry of a photo, text description,
and instant messenger IDs.
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MBO Status Report Tracking
On a weekly basis, employees were required to send MBO (Management
By Objective) status reports to their managers, who would then compile
them into department MBOs and pass them up to the executive level. This
was originally accomplished through weekly emails that were compiled
into Word documents, which was a huge pain in the arse for all involved,
not to mention being practically impossible to archive. By turning it
into a database application, employees and managers were able to more
easily submit their reports, and management could then run a variety
of reports to track the long term productivity of the company. The
tool also pulled it's user list directly from the Employee Contact
List, to eliminate redundancy.
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OATS (OpenGrid Asset Tracking System)
This tool was created to assist the IT and QA departments in tracking the
status of all assets that the company assigned to each employee. For IT,
the primary uses were tracking which computer was assigned to which user,
what software was installed on each computer, and how many licenses the
company owned for each software title. For QA, it tracked what cell phones,
PDAs and other devices were lent out to which users for testing. Again,
the user list was pulled directly from the Employee Contact List, so
that it would be simple, for example, to see what items an employee was
responsible for returning as they left the company.
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Microsoft Exchange Integration
Taking advantage of the ability to include external URLs within the site's
common UI, I was able to seamlessly integrate MS Exchange Server's web-based
email interface to provide a one-stop solution for those employees who are
connecting to the Intranet from home or while on the road.
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My only real regret with this project is that I hadn't come across PHP yet
when I built it, and was thus limited by ASP's awkward implementation of includes.
Using some of the PHP-based techniques that I have perfected on this personal site
and a few other projects, I could have added the ability for non-technical users
to modify the site hierarchy without having to see a single line of code. Perhaps
I'll get a chance to test that theory on my next Intranet project...
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