UI widgets for ESME

[Marcelo Pham]

Hi there, I had a chat with Dick and he thought it would be good to share this idea we had for Akibot with the ESME community: General concept 1. The idea is to include a "widget" area to ESME front end. These widgets would be plug & play components that help users from a same group or department to see real time info, such as financials, inventory maps, sales, etc. etc.  In brief, we would be marrying business intelligence (widgets showing relevant, summarized information in real time) with social media (microblog), this would give the whole group a sense of total business awareness (they would know exactly what's going on, what employees are chatting about, issues (microblog), what's the most named item, the most mentioned customer (tags), figures for sales, inventory (widgets)) 2. For example, the executive and sales groups would have a widget in their microblog that would show real time information for today's and YTD orders: This widget would read data from the SD module and inform everybody how sales are doing. 3. We would start with widgets that read from SAP modules (SD, FI, MM, etc.) and maybe after we could extend it to other ERP's (JD Edwards, Mas500, Navision, etc) or other groupware apps (Salesforce, Exchange, etc.) Details 4. If ESME can be skinnable (meaning to allow users to change around the HTML of the front end) these widgets could be embeddable in the form of an object, like: <object classid="" codebase=""http://widget.esme.us/?v=1.0">http://widget.esme.us/?v=1.0" width="200" height="400" align="middle"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="movie" value="widget1.swf" /> <param name="quality" value="high" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="feed_username" value="username" /> <param name="feed_password" value="12345abcd" /> <param name="feed_url" value="http://10.1.1.10/SAPFeed/" /> <embed src="" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="200" height="400" name="foo" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /> </object> Or something like this but using JS. 5. Widgets would be available to download from common open repositories such as ESME website, Google code, etc. A widget would be composed by a Flash or JS file to download, and a sample code to embed into the HTML front end with instructions on how to customize it. We will contribute with all the widgets we do and also help develop widgets made by other members.    6. Since these will be all behind-the-firewall installations, there should not be many security issues, although we would include a username/password to authenticate to the SAP feed    Open for discussion 7. Embeddable code / format: we haven't decided what formats will be the best (JS, Flash, both...)  8. Connection / authentication: how to connect to the SAP feed and how to authenticate to it 9. Widget permissions: how to allow/hide widgets for different groups (for example the sales widget should not be shown to the purchasing group, etc.)  What do you guys think? Good night, Marcelo Pham Head Developer Akibot