OpenText SmartUI a new Perspective over your content

UPDATE

During the upcoming OpenText Live Webinar (Tailored SmartUI for improved productivity) scheduled for this Thursday (11am Eastern), we will be showcasing how the Module Suite can be utilized to further enhance the SmartUI with the objective of increasing user productivity.

Registration can be done through this link

More and more often we are receiving requests from customers willing to start using SmartUI as their primary interface, but still sceptical regarding what they can really achieve with it. 

With this post I'd like to offer food for thought as well as a taste of what you can actually achieve by combining the Smart UI with Module Suite. I hope that at the end of the reading you will be absolutely convinced that is time to re-think the way you are providing access to your contents.

It took me just half a day to implement the solution for the business case I am going to discuss; nonetheless, as you'll see, this is not an index of a reduced complexity.

The business case.

We want to collect expenses reports from our employees on a weekly basis. To make it easy, we are going to provide our users with a simple excel file through which they can keep track of their expenses.

At the same time, we would like to archive all these files and organize them by year and week number. 

Obviously each employee's report shall be approved upon archival. 

To make this process more effective we would like to provide our managers with some analytic regarding weekly expenses, with particular reference to how they are distributed among a set of predefined categories (e.g. "TRANSPORTATION", "LODGING & MEALS", "MISCELLANEOUS"). Most importantly, we would like to reduce at a minimum the number of interactions needed to get the job done.

The solution.

We use a SmartUI Perspective made of three widgets to present the information stored under our "Expenses management" archive. 

The first widget (a tree) grants fast access to all the archive sub folder, helping users to quickly understand which weeks have already been processed (in green) and which ones still require some work (in red). 

At the bottom of the Perspective we use a standard node-table widget to display the content of the current selected folder.

The last widget, at the top right of the perspective, provides some analytic related with the expenses contained in the week folder. In particular, it provides the sub-totals for expenses organized in the following categories:("TRANSPORTATION", "LODGING & MEALS","MISCELLANEOUS").

We created two categories (metadata set) to provide fast access to the information stored in the archive. The first category is attached to each Week folder and it is essentially made of two attributes: "Week Expenses Status", which is valued as "Completed" whenever all the expenses have been processed, and "Week Expenses Total", which is used to display the total amount of expenses the company incurred in that week. The second category, attached directly to expenses report documents, is used to track:

• the employee who reported the expenses; 
• the total amount of the reported expenses; 
• the year and the week number the report belongs to. 

We also used the two categories to create two custom columns displayed in the node-table widget.

The user experience.

In order to archive a set of expenses reports our users have just to drop their excel files in the appropriate Week folder. 

A Content Script is trigged by that event and it:

• reads from the excel worksheet the name of the employee, to whom the report belongs to and uses this information to fill in the category's "employee" attribute;
• reads from the excel worksheet the total amount for the expenses report and uses this information to fill in the category's "Total" attribute;
• fills in the category's "Year" and "Week Number" attributes on the basis of the Week folder the document was dropped in;
• renames the document on the basis of the employee's name.

The result is immediately available for the user who performed the upload.

We usually refer to this kind of automation as "transparent automation" ( i.e. the kind of automation that is there, but you don't have to care about).

The Content Script which backed the Perspective top-right widget detects that some documents are now available into the Week folder and, in real-time, goes over each one of them by reading from the excel worksheets the sub-totals for the categories ("TRANSPORTATION", "LODGING & MEALS","MISCELLANEOUS") and uses the collected information to feed both a pie-chart and a table.

In order to manage the approval for the reported expenses, our managers just have to ask the system to generate an approval report excel file for each week. This is easily done by clicking the "Download report for update" button in the top right widget. 

To actually approve or reject the expenses reports, they have just to change the status in the approval report file and to re-upload it through the top-right widget("Upload approval report" button).

A Content Script manages the upload process and it:

• goes over each line of the approval report file to update the category's "Status" attribute of the corresponding document;
• collects the the reported expenses total amount and use it to update the Week folder category's "Week Expenses Total" attribute;
• changes the status of the Week folder category's "Week Expenses Status" to "Completed".

Here below a video that showcases the solution in action: