Using XPages for an employee portal / dashboard

28. Nov, 2010 8 Comments

Hi,

from march until may this year, i had to write my bachelor thesis and because i love challenges, i had to write about the new kid on the block: XPages.

Because of the lack of documentation it was a hard time, but finally i made it *still can’t believe it*. Round about 95 Latex Pages have been written and 15 Pages had to be deleted because of university rules *grr*.

The finished prototype

The topic of my thesis was the enhancement of the usability of the information management in the company that i work for. The end-result is an employee portal / dashboard inside Lotus Notes, where each employee has all information necessary in an aggregated format. The Content is completely customisable by user-groups or single users,  and each user can layout the information-blocks as he/she likes. There is absolutely NO Notes Design element, that defines the overall content of the portal, all information-blocks are loaded dynamically based on the user, that opens the page.

Based on the fact, that the content of the portal is defined by notes documents, instead of hard-coded design elements, it should also be no problem to implement a portlet / widget – catalogue, where the user can create his portal completely on his own, by choosing from all available custom controls.

Because i wasn’t to happy about the mark that i got (1.6) i submitted my work to the yearly university competition of the DNUG – the german notes user group – and *surprise surprise* i won the first price :-)

So now relax, and enjoy the first screencast about my application. Another screencast will follow in about a week, and will be more on the low-level technical side.

Screencast

Lotus Notes
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8 Responses to “Using XPages for an employee portal / dashboard”

  1. Pat Sawyer 29. Nov, 2010 at 01:41

    Really great job here. This is one of the best xpage projects I have seen yet.

    I would love to look at the nsf if you are making it available. Perhaps an openntf project?

  2. Mario
    Mario 29. Nov, 2010 at 01:52

    Thanks Pat :-)

    I don’t know yet if the nsf will be made public, because its the property of the company, that i work for and i can image some political reasons not to do so. If i get the ok from my boss, i will write a new blog entry.

    I will do another video next weekend (i hope so), explaining more technical details, so it should be possible to rebuilt the application. I expect the video to become 20-30 minutes.

  3. Pat Sawyer 29. Nov, 2010 at 02:37

    I understand. I am looking at building out something similar, just hoped to stand on the shoulders of giants :) Perhaps your boss could be sold on the free development that open source could provide(shot in the dark)

    Still really impressive work! I look forward to any upcoming blog entries & video.

  4. Martin 29. Nov, 2010 at 09:47

    Very nice project Mario. I think it would be a great benefit for openntf.

  5. Paul Withers 29. Nov, 2010 at 11:15

    A great success story of the flexibility and power of Domino and XPages. It looks great.

  6. Patrick Kwinten 14. Dec, 2010 at 10:33

    interesting results! maybe we can get a more meaningfull startpage in the Notes client some day with such an Portal application.

  7. Hermann Pallasch 12. Jan, 2011 at 18:40

    Herzliche Gratulation zum DNUG-Preis!

    Gibt es evt. ein PDF der Bachelor-Arbeit, ich würde sie gern mal lesen!

    P.S. 2003 hab ich den ersten DNUG-Award mit einem Kunden gewonnen… Ist ein gutes Gefühl, so’n Preis, nicht?

  8. Prabhakar 12. Jan, 2012 at 08:04

    Really impressive work, Even i am working on the same thing(dashboard using xpages) for my company :)

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