As I have mentioned before we are going to start a new sprint and begin on a new version of the portal. In this post I will mention a bit more detail on the next sprint and describe what we think we will do the rest of the year.
4.6 sprint 1
This sprint that will start tomorrow and end 21st of October will focus on one main feature, customizable start pages.
So what is a this, it is a dashboard type of page that you see on live.com, igoogle etc. It’s a page where you either allow individuals or Admins to put mini applications on a start page. So how does this work and why should you care. Since Agresso HRM TM right now supports learning and employee data processes with HR as a customer you might want to display information for your favorite ERP system ABW or any other system in the portal since all your users have access to this portal but maybe not to other systems.
By implementing this you will actually be able to display data from other systems, display reports on the start page with you crucial KPI’s for this year or you can simply have a rss roller if you publish news via rss that everyone that uses the Agresso TM portal should be aware of.
So what is a dashboard and how does it look:
Each start page for a role is a dashboard in this dashboard is template driven and you can select different templates, eg. a three column layout like above or a one column full page template. These templates is really simple for us to make custom for you as a customer. A dashboard really only contains one or "panels” to start with. In a panel a user with proper permissions can then put gadgets in the panels. The portal will support one dashboard per role for Administrators to configure, and if enabled each user can customize his own start page.
Gadgets
So what is a gadget, a gadget is a small application that can give you information in a relatively small space, we will provide functionality for a gadget catalog where we and third party vendors can upload new gadgets. We will provide every thing you can see now on the start pages as gadgets, the shortcuts, system information, news etc from us. In addition we will also develop a chart gadget where you use your flexible fields to do averages etc on KPI’s. For us and report gadget so you can have your custom reports on the start page.
So what’s in it for a gadget developer, first of all as a gadget developer you will get information on who is logged in. you will also have access to our services for making queries about organizations and that particular user. In other you will get world class employee and organization information.
We will support in the final version for 4.6 also the possibility to host your gadgets within Agresso TM in addition to hosting your self on your server. So it will be fully possible to have
- a gadget on i.e the recruiting site that displays the current available jobs in the portal.
- a gadget displaying the task list from ABW
- a weather gadget from google
- a Chart displaying the average number of sick days per employee
- a Chart gadget displaying the staff turn around for one particular organization (the logged on user)
All this can be developed or configured in the portal and driven from our security model if you use our services, or roll your own for your database.
We have decided that we will support Gadget API that open social builds upon and is supported by many other applications.
http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/dev_guide.html is the specification for gadgets we are going to implement. The reason for choosing an existing api is that we don't want to invent the wheel again and to make it easier for third parties to understand and engage them in gadget development.
Product roadmap 2009-2010 4.6
We will start to release previews that you can use on QA and or production, but you must be aware of that we will add and or change functionality until we are feature complete on 4.6.
Week starting oct 26 first customer preview of 4.6 will be available
- Dashboard and some gadgets
Week starting nov 30 second customer preview
- More gadgets
- Possibility to host your gadget code in Agresso TM
Week starting January 11th Feature complete 4.6
- A more visual organization manager
These are estimated dates and not promises.
