Recipe 4. InOut Dashboard

Recipe 4. In/Out Dashboard

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

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

To support the Dashboard and its announcement section, this application uses four pages in all. 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 announcement section one to manage the announcements in general, designating which ones should be displayed and which should be deleted; and another page for adding announcements.