Recipe4.InOut Dashboard

Recipe 4. In/Out Dashboard

One of the first rules of business is to keep a close eye on all your assetsand employees are among an organization's primary assets. The In/Out Dashboard application provides a visual representation of the location of all intranet employees. With a look at the Dashboard, you can instantly tell whether an employee is in the office, in a meeting, on the road, or wherever. With minor modifications, this application can also keep track of virtually any asset, such as training discs, laptop computers, or even company cars.

Because the Dashboard is a natural employee-gathering place, it's a good location on which to display companywide announcements. Such announcements need to be timely and well managed; corporate messages released before their time can be damaging to business, and those displayed for too long lessen the impact of other notices.

To support the Dashboard and its announcements section, this application uses four pages. One page provides the main interface for the in/out board and message section; a bullet character in a particular status column designates an employee's status. A necessary function of any such application is the ability to easily alter an employee's status; in our application, each employee's name on the in/out board is linked to a detail record where the status updates can be made. Two pages are used to administer the announcements sectionone page for managing the announcements in general, designating which ones should be displayed and which should be deleted; and another page for adding announcements.