Solving real world problems in the enterprise
Windows NT is not an end unto itself—it's a tool. Combine it with third-party products and in-house development in an enterprise environment, and NT can make the lives of your networkd users much easier, which makes your life easier.
For the third annual NT Innovators awards, the editorial staff of Windows NT Magazine asked readers to share their innovative and unique approaches to using NT. We accepted nominations on our Web site and selected the most exciting users of NT and third-party products in 1998. Read on to find out how people from around the globe, from Canberra to Columbus and Stockholm to San Jose, are using NT in innovative ways.
3COM
COMBINING A RELATIONAL DATABASE, DHTML, AND CAD TO HELP EMPLOYEES FIND EACH OTHER
If you work for a large company, you probably don't know everyone by sight
or necessarily know where they sit. What happens when you need to work with another employee you've never met? Wandering down rows of cubicles, peering in at people, and asking, "Are you Ron?" as if you were meeting a blind date can be embarrassing.
Don Franke, a software engineer at 3Com's Rolling Meadows, Illinois,
office, is using an online graphical database of employees and their cubicle
locations to help more than 500 people in a three-story building find each other
more easily. Franke's database lets users know who they're looking for and the
employee's location before the user walks down the corridor. Using a Web
browser, a user can search for another employee by name and view a page with a
photograph of the employee the user plans to meet, the employee's full name and
department, and the section of the floor showing the location of the employee's
cubicle. The page also gives the user a sense of the employee's location by
highlighting the appropriate section of a map of the building floor. The
database runs on the company intranet from a Windows NT Server 4.0 machine
running Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 and using Active Server Pages
(ASP).
Franke's solution works well, but it took some preparation and a few months
to realize. First, he studied Dynamic HTML (DHTML) to ensure that his idea would
work as he envisioned. After some initial testing, he developed the interface
and began adding the personal data. Franke extracted information from a Human
Resources Excel spreadsheet and imported it into an Access 97 database because
he prefers to work with databases. He added the personal information into the
relational database and used one table to hold employee information and cubicle
locations and another table to map the cubicle locations to X and Y coordinates
in the building. Franke developed this approach anticipating that employees
might have to move to another cubicle at some point.
Creating the images for the database involved a lot of cutting and pasting.
Franke obtained a CAD drawing of each building floor, cut each drawing into six
sections, and used Adobe Photoshop to create a clean .gif file of each section.
To show users where each section is in relation to the other sections, he also
made a clean .gif file of the entire floor, color-coding each section like the
maps in a shopping mall.
Finally, he put the pieces together and added support to let local
department administrators edit the table that maps their employees to cubicle
locations and add pictures of their employees. The final step in creating the
online database was designing a drag-and-drop tool that let Franke edit cubicle
locations graphically, rather than typing in X and Y coordinates.
The initial version of the graphical employee-locator tool includes only
one of the three floors in the building, but Franke suggests that future plans
might include adding support for the other two floors. Future enhancements might
also include a 3D image of the entire building using Virtual Reality Modeling
Language (VRML) technology and touch-screen support. However, for the
moment, the project is complete. "It was a short-term project, and it's
basically done," Franke said.
Franke didn't have any problems importing the data into the database or
creating the images he needed. Rather, his main problem resulted from browser
compatibility on the clients. "Even though Netscape is the corporate
standard, not everyone uses the same version," he said. "Even Netscape
4.04 and 4.05 don't react in the same way to DHTML object positioning in
response to the system display and font settings." Franke developed a
solution to this problem, but said, "It was starting to get convoluted. I
wanted to keep it simple." He decided to make the site compatible with
Netscape 4.05 and later versions. Earlier versions of the Web browser simply
pointed to a non-DHTML page that included only a directory listing without
graphics. All in all, Franke's innovation solves a problem many large companies
face. The solution is flexible enough to support changes in the employee
database, floor plan, or both.