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Back to school

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:11

Simon Jones gets some help with his school work from PC Pro readers, and reveals the changes that have happened in the Digital Dashboard technology

This change means that standalone users who don't have Windows 2000 Server won't be able to use the new Dashboards directly. Microsoft hopes, however, that many third-party companies will start using Dashboard and Web Part technology in their Web portals. The Resource Kit comes with documentation on the Dashboard and Web Part schemas, as well as white papers on planning for, building and deploying Digital Dashboards.

A variety of 22 pre-fabricated Web Parts ship with the new

Resource Kit, and these cover the full range of both usefulness and sophistication. The Calendar Web part (calendar.dwp) just shows the calendar for a month, and illustrates how to embed an ActiveX control into a Web Part, but beyond that it's completely useless. The obligatory business news, weather and traffic cameras Web Parts are all tied irrevocably to MSNBC and the US.

Other Web Parts will show you a folder-full or an item of Outlook data. These are fully-featured, showing Day/ Week/Month views of your calendar or customisable views of your Inbox, Tasks, and so on. They use the same Outlook View Control that was released for use with the previous Dashboards. At the higher end of sophistication and usefulness, there are Web Parts supplied by Decision Support Panel, Honeywell and Cambridge Technology Partners.

However, one of the beauties of Web Parts is that they can contain anything that can be described in HTML, XML, JavaScript or VBScript, so if you can find a Web page - anywhere in the world - that contains data you'd like in your Dashboard, you can create a Web Part that points to that page. If you can export data as XML - for example, from a query in SQL Server 2000 - you can show that data in a Web Part by applying an appropriate style sheet.

If you can write small applets in VBScript or JavaScript, you can show and interact with data from any source. If your data is more complicated or needs a greater degree of interaction, you can use ActiveX controls such as the Office 2000 Web Components to show database or spreadsheet data, charts and even live, interactive PivotTables and PivotCharts. You could even write your own ActiveX control in VB or Delphi to do anything you want.

Wrapping up these ActiveX controls or script applets into Web Parts is easy, as the Dashboard Factory comes with an Administration Dashboard containing Web Parts that allow you to create, edit and delete other Web Parts. This incestuous or self-referential relationship is vey confusing when you first start to work with the new Resource Kit: it's important that you don't alter the Welcome or Administration Dashboards, or think that the Web Parts folder is just another Dashboard with everything on it.

The person who acts as the Dashboard administrator will make Web Parts available from a local catalogue held on the network Web Server, and a Dashboard developer can take these Web Parts, or any new ones they create, and build them into company-, department- or job-specific Dashboards. The administrator can then make these Dashboards available to end users. They are, after all, just Web pages that have URLs that can be typed into any Web browser.

If you want to use them within Outlook, just set the Home Page property within any Outlook folder. Security can be set to allow or deny users the ability to alter the layout or content of their Dashboards, or to create new Web Parts themselves - though I personally would be nervous about giving any end user the ability to create new Web Parts unless they were very good at designing Web pages. Allowing the users to pick from a secure catalogue of built and tested parts should be enough for most people.