site logo

More intranet applications

sceenshot of intranet application Phone Book

On every intranet you can find phone book. One of many solution, acceptable for a several hundrets phone lines you see on screenshot. It is designed as a static page, without using database and all changes are done right in HTML. List of members is continuous, long page, what is an advantage at printing.

Some names (on basis of personal agreement) are supplement with link to personal data: photo, home address and home phone number. New employees may introduce themself to others and in return they can more easily memorize their new colleagues. Personal data security is problem and it is impossible to force anybody to publish that.

Below title bar of page is alphabet for fast jump on desired initial letter. To go back on top of page you click on any big blue letter.

 
sceenshot of intranet application Weather Report

Part of control system for glass melting is data collection of atmospheric pressure, humidity and temperature. Why not use weather data also for other workers? In screenshot you can see these data (last 7 days) displayed in graph with help of vector graphics.

I wanted to try vertical cursor, that follow mouse movement over graph and at the same time display digital values, which are under cursor. You can see cursor in screenshot as a upright grey line in right part of graph. Corresponding numerical values are situated above the graph.

Numerical values are stored in javascipt arrays. Javascript function onmousemove() calculates new cursor position according to mouse position in graph, displays vertical cursor in new position with help of CSS, further index in data array is calculated and numerical values are fetched from array and displayed in white boxes.

Such cursor type is often used in industrial applications. Here in browser it is a bit slower, but it works.

 
sceenshot of intranet application Canteen

Canteen menu is part of almost any intranet. It is surprise how little attention developers pay to so often used application. Somewhere stored excel table, to which you need many mouse clicks, enter password, to get knew what is today feed, I would stay hungry.

Menu card may look different. Just from home page is link to canteen page, where menu for today is displayed. If you want, you can download and print week's menu too.

Some problems had to be solved. At first, original form of excel sheet was duty for upload, but how to get data from excel file? I solved this by marking of area in excel sheet, then I was able to use ADO object to treat excel sheet as a database and read each cell as separated data. So it is no need to install Office on server.

The second issue was a date. There are some differences in month names in Czech language and when on Monday or Friday is a holiday the date (form, to) is unambiguous. So I decided to ignore writen date and setup another rule. File uploaded on Tuesday and on is menu for next week. On Monday it is possible to upload corrected menu for current week. When file is uploaded, sever determines current date, calculate date of menu for this or next week, parse excel sheet, add food items to particular days and stores data to database. Original Excel file is saved for download.

 

In tour section I described most of my intranet applications. Basic target of tour was to inspire developers of intranet to build similar applications, which proved to be usefull.

updated 29.11.2006