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New web tools lack integration
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2006
Apr 23
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Ajax is quite the buzzword recently. It’s the harbringer of Web2.0 and is certainly helping revive another internet boom period. Just about fancy new web application or web site you go to uses Ajax to make it “cool”. Google uses and abuses it wonderfully and then others follow suit. Visiting eHub and other Web2.0 blogs and sites, you’ll find a herd of new useful tools - from bookmarking, to FedEx tracking, to invoicing and gaming. All these new tools are great but for the world of intranets they don’t really help.
As a maker of intranet(s) for a pretty good sized company, I have to consistently pump out top-quality, usable applications. Nearly 100% of the tools I have to build from scratch, either writing them entirely myself or with frameworks and modules found online. I can’t just buy products or get a subscription to these fancy-yet-useful Ajax tools because each is its own entity, which is a bitch when you consider an intranet.
An intranet needs to be one big seamless experience. Single-login and common interfaces for as much as possible to keep things simple and easy for the user. Ajax helps me make new tools very usable, but I still have to build them from the ground up. Buying into discrete tools online and asking users to log in and use them turns the intranet into a portal and not a resource, which is not an option.
People bitch enough as it is when they have to log on to their computer AND log on to the intranet, and it’s the same login for both! So what’s a developer to do? You copy.
When I make my blog rounds to see what’s new and hip, I take notes and try to pick apart the logic for each one so I can then (in essence) build that same application for use on the intranet. For many projects, I would much rather buy and integrate, but many vendors don’t offer easy integration, especially with a custom intranet, nor do they offer enterprise packages.
With the purchasing option gone, the alternative is open source products. While open source provides a wide variety of options to look at, they still have limited integration options. Once again, separate account management and additional logons.
What I have yet to find is a product that is flexible enough and open enough to allow the integration I need. It doesn’t have to be open source (although that would be nice) but have an API or other option that lets me decide and program the integration for logins and users. Options for database would be great too, although many do offer this option already. I can even let design slide if I could make using it a distraction-free event.
Whenever a new project is proposed, my boss always askes if there is something we can buy to get the job done. Since I’m (still) a one-man department, my time is limited and he knows that buying saves that time I don’t have. I always look as asked, but nothing I find works for all the reasons above, but he seemingly doesn’t get it - or is fine with making user life harder than it already is.
Technology sucks enough as it is right now, the last thing Bob the Salesguy needs is another login, another password, and another reason to hate using our intranet. I would rather build tools that work the way we need and take an extra 3-months than take the easy way out by buying and then making things difficult and frustrating. Frustrated users make frustrated developers.