Preliminary Considerations

[Previous] [Next]

A Digital Dashboard is similar in concept to the dashboard of a car. Just as a driver relies on the dashboard to check the car's speed, oil level, and engine temperature, a computer user needs an easy way to quickly scan his computer for vital information. A Digital Dashboard combines an easy-to-use Web interface with a complex series of back-end systems such as Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, or Web information systems.

When creating your Digital Dashboard, you should take into account the following considerations:

• Customizability. Imagine if the dashboard in your car displayed information about the voltage of the rear turn signal—you wouldn't consider that data terribly useful or important. In the same way that you want the dashboard of your car to display information that matters, you want your Digital Dashboard to display information that's pertinent to the current user. Allowing users to fully or partially customize the information contained in the Digital Dashboards makes their lives easier. If you're using Microsoft Windows 2000, Active Directory is the logical choice for holding your Digital Dashboard customization information.
• Offline capability. Usually the people who are the most interested in dashboards are executives. And most executives are mobile, meaning the ability to work offline is important to them. As you'll see later in the chapter, offline capability is one of the reasons the Digital Dashboard samples from Microsoft are hosted in Outlook 2000.
• Scalability. If you plan for 10,000 people to use your Digital Dashboard, you want to be sure that if 5,000 of them hit the same data source at the same time, your systems can handle the load. It's disheartening to try accessing content with a Digital Dashboard that's not up to the task.