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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

Whether you deploy Dashboards from the file system or from SQL Server or Exchange Server will depend on your network infrastructure and on the requirements of your end users. It's no good, for instance, using SQL Server to store the Dashboards and Web Parts if your users are often working off-line or away from the office.

The speed of display is another deciding factor in the use of Dashboards, as the CPU speed of the client PC, network speed and loading, the power of the Web server and the speed and loading of your Internet connection will all influence the time it takes to display a Dashboard page - if you put many, complicated Web Parts on the same Dashboard don't be surprised if it takes ten or 20 seconds to display it, which may well be unacceptable to some users for their Outlook Today page. It would be better to put the slower-loading Web Parts onto sub-Dashboards that can be accessed only when they're needed.

There are still several bugs and 'issues' with these new Digital Dashboards - security in Outlook being one of them. The Outlook Today page has its own special security context and if you make Outlook Today point to one of these new Dashboards, you may find its security settings stop you from editing the advanced properties of Web Parts. A related problem is that passing data to and from ActiveX controls may violate security on other folders, so that a Web Part that will run as Outlook Today may not run in some other folders. Certain Web Parts, particularly those based on the earlier nugget system won't work at all outside of Outlook.

The Dashboard team is aware of these limitations and is working to fix them, and you can expect a rash of third-party Web Parts to become available over the next few months. Web Parts and Dashboards will become an integral part of the next version of Microsoft Office. Details of the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit are available from www.microsoft.com/solutions/ km/DDRK.htm. The Resource Kit is a free download, but remember that you need Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server to run the Dashboard Factory.