Out Of the Box Experience (OOBE Newbie New)

Well the development cutoff of Manage 2000 7.3 sp3 is done. I have upgraded our build system and development web server to sp4 where 7.3 future development will happen, and created the views for patching sp3. Now I wait and wait and wait while Release Control readies installs for the field and customer sites slowly rollout new service pack upgrades or come on board from older major releases.

One of the areas I have been trying to enrich is the How To documentation on various web setup processes. I hope this combined with more appropriate Sales Rep and Customer menus and default role preferences will make setting up external access to Manage 2000 less daunting, and thereby give more Manage 2000 sites ROI justification for upgrading to the newest Manage 2000 release.

Imagine Sales Reps, Service Personnel, Buyers for customers at trade shows pulling out their IPhone, Droid, or IPad and interacting directly with your Manage 2000 site.

IE 9.0 Firefox 4,5,6... and counting and Chrome

Manage 2000 7.3 sp3 is now building in development with IE9 compatibility in standards mode with HTML 5.0 support. WhooooooooooooHooooooooooooooooo!!!

Development is scheduled to continue till mid-October giving a nice cushion for alpha testing to clean up any construction debris. So things are looking good for 7.3 sp3.

I still need to spend some quality time with the roiScreenControl used in the web product configurator to implement the new scrolled set capability and make it cross browser compatible with Chrome and Safari. But other than that everything seems to be running well in IE9, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

A nice side benefit of the IE9 project for 7.3 sp3 is that more of the mobile tools and applications slated for 7.4 will make an early appearance. The ESOP module in particular will start sporting a sleek mobile look with a sales product code browsing app with add to cart capability, and mobile formatted shopping cart and checkout pages.

Wizard's Work

Manage 2000 7.4 development now includes a wizard that is capable of generating a maintenance web function with single valued fields and scrolled sets somewhat akin to PWS.

And there were a LOT of bytes in that elephant!

But the payback is a reduction in cost of writing web clients for Manage 2000 maintenance and posting functions, which we will leverage during the remainder of the standard system development cycle. And it will produce further payback as a tool for custom development projects.

The Manage 2000 tooling for the faux scrolled sets leverages the ajax validation, last keys, and prompt stack features of the roiTextbox and provides smooth keyboard navigation.

It takes just a few moments to select fields from a business transaction object and generate a working web function, which can be further enhanced and polished in Visual Studio.

ITouch'd Manage 2000

Well the Manage 2000 7.4 web repository is finally branched and 7.4 only development can now be checked in. But one last web tools development project did make it into the 7.3 sp3 code base before the branch; MT/M2000Mobile/M2000Mobile.aspx provides navigation based on MENU.MASTER trees and DEMO/MobileStockStatusByLoc/MobileStockStatusByLoc.aspx which provides an example application to copy.

The idea is to build HTML, javascript, and CSS styles that mimic mobile applications, rather than building applications in proprietary environments one end-user device at a time. Using micro-frameworks like WebApp.Net one can build a web page that looks and feels like a mobile app although it runs in the browser.

Sp2 just went out the door so we won't be launching sp3 for awhile but it should be available in plenty of time for stocking stuffers.

iManage2000

This last month I've been testing and researching issues related to accessing Manage 2000 web functions from IPhone and Android based mobile devices. Since these internet enabled devices include web browsers the basic ability to run Manage 2000 web functions is built right in.

However there are stumbling blocks to their usability. The most obvious problem is the small screen and the large complex pages of standard Manage 2000 web function pages. A little further examination reveals navigation problems in the drop down menus. These are rendered by Infragistics UltraWebMenu controls which do not work properly with WebKit based browsers. Another issue to consider is performance when accessing the net through slower connections. (How many G's are there in T1?)

So, though you can go the discount route and setup phone desktop buttons to target specific standard Manage 2000 web functions, a little more work can lead to a much better user experience.

The road map to a better user experience includes replacing the standard heading banner with a navigation app based on IUI, WebApp.Net, or Sencha Touch. The menus should still be administerable in MENU.BUILD, but the whole mobile menu tree would get loaded to the mobile browser as a multi-layer page with anchor navigation between layers. This would provide the user with rapid menu navigation including familiar slide transitions and header navigation buttons.

Functions would work off of standard hyperlinks and load and postback in their usual fashion. Though any specific mobile web function development should consider leveraging the layer tools in these micro-frameworks. Other mobile web function best practices would include avoiding the IG Grid in lieu of lighter weight options, minimizing the information displayed in any given layer to 5-7 items and providing multiple choice data entry in place of fill in the blank wherever possible.

Sizing the formatting table to 480 x 320 can help give a design time feel for mobile screen territory at standard magnification. HTML meta tags like <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0;" /> can be used to control the magnification level of the web function when initially displayed. Since these micro frameworks tend to use CSS hiding techniques they interfere with the design time WSYIWYG in Visual Studio. You can temporarily comment out the stylesheet link in the aspx file to get a better designer experience.