From Zeroasterisk

People Directory search results

People Directory individual results

An example of one of the tools, an RSS reader.

A list of links exported from Livelink, transformed into a display method, and put onto the an intranet page.

Alan works in HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, ASP, PHP (not as much as Alan would like), XML, and XSL to create tools for Knowledge Coordinators to use to deliver web content. Alan creates templates, tools, and techniques and helps implement them throughout the intranet (serving ~350 Knowledge Coordinators and 15,000 Mercer employees, worldwide).

People Directory

One of the major projects Alan worked on is the People Directory. The People Directory is Mercer's primary source of employee contact information. Using the People Directory, you can locate employees using a number of criteria, such as name, location, business/function, or leadership information. The search results are returned in a sortable grid.

The display for an individual gives as much content as is available (though we are working on getting more content) and also retrieves a transformed (into HTML) version of a Word biography document, if it's available for this individual. Once we get more information to display, we are planning on moving to a tabbed interface displaying Exchange Groups, Reporting Hierarchy, Current responsibilities, etc.

Box of Tools

The Box of Tools offered to the Knowledge Coordinators of the company include menu generators, list generators, breadcrumb trail generators, shared stylesheets and Javascript files. The page framework is dynamic, allowing a few different layouts with only one template. Furthermore, the template can accept content from inside the web, from other webs, from our document management system (Livelink) and hard coded into the page.

Livelink

Mercer uses Livelink to manage it's Intellectual Capital. Livelink's interface is not the best though, so many of our tools extract data from Livelink and display it on the KC controlled webs. We do this dynamically and with cached methods. The content from Livelink can be any type of document and there can be many different categorizations, classifications, attributes, versions associated with it. We can gather as much data as needed and provide interface to the content in a variety of ways, including a simple list, an expanding and collapsing list, a select (drop down) - and almost any other display method you can think of.