| For more examples of Customizing RoAccess, Click Here |
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| People are always looking for ways to make
access to their Rochade Repository as easy as possible. Most Repository
users are not technical, so access should be as intuitive as possible.
This page shows two different approaches to a Graphical Front End. This customer is in Germany, hence the German language selection. The first has he first has a single custom graphic that lists the main functional categories of the Repository. Upon clicking one of them, a dynamic graphical diagram for that functional area is drawn showing all the contained sub areas, systems and interfaces. Clicking on any of these objects brings up its Rochade Item display. The second approach is similar. Multiple levels of pre-made custom graphics that show categories and sub-categories are presented. Clicking on a category, bring us additional, lower level custom graphics. When a lowest level graphic element is clicked, then the Rochade Item is displayed. What should be remembered is that these graphics could be pictures, flow charts, Entity-Relationship Diagrams or anything that help presents the relationship of the various data. Whatever graphics you have, RoAccess can integrate them. |
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| These menus were made with Photoshop, and then hotspots were added using Mapedit to produce the client side image map. The URL's then pointed to the next level graphics, if any, or special URL's to go directly into the various parts of RoAccess, for example such as Item Displays or Graphic Path Reports. |
Clicking the Second button, "Customer Service Interface", displays the following dynamic graphical representation of that functional area.
Each object (in this case yellow and green rectangles) when clicked will pop up its Rochade Item Display. Note the custom Radio Tower icon, which is a symbol of this business product. The images superimposed on the objects are 1) people working together and 2) the world globe, centered on Europe, where this customer is located. However, if the "Product Factory" button is clicked, the following dynamic graphical representation of that functional area is displayed:
This clearly shows the recursive relationship between Products that can have Products.
Multi-Level Graphical Menus These menus were again made with Photoshop, and then hotspots were added using Mapedit to produce the client side image map.
If the "Customer Relationship Management" button on the menu is clicked, the following graphic menu appears showing the functional areas that are below it.
If the "Customer Service Interface" button on the menu is clicked, the following graphic menu appears showing the functional areas that are below it.
Clicking on one of the lowest area buttons, will cause the Item Display to pop up. If the user needs to give a password to access Rochade, then the following user name and password screen will appear:
After the user has logged once, then every subsequent time he clicks a low level menu button, the Item Display will automatically appear, and the user name/password screen will not be shown again, because he has already successfully logged in previously. Below is a typical Item Display. This Item will later be filled out to give complete information. The Graphic Front End was developed with simulated data, so it's approach could first be evaluated and accepted. In a way, this is prototyping, but it is not a prototype. These are the actual menus, graphics and data displays. With RoAccess, the prototype IS the actual screen. When you finish the "prototype", you have completed the application.
Since the Radio Tower was to be an important symbol for this service, RoAccess was instructed to display it on the top of every RoAccess screen. Below are two examples.
Conclusion
Both
single-level and multi-level graphical menus were considered and presented for evaluation. The entire time to build these completely functional systems was about 3 hours. Since it takes such a short time to create new front ends for RoAccess, one can then investigate other front end approaches without spending much time or money, and you can see which approach seems to best meet your requirements.