Process Engineering
A friend of mine wanted a logo for his new company. He was just marketing himself as a free-agent in the construction world, but there was no need to have some off the shelf card and logo. So, I make him one quick. I like how a little bit of treatment, graphics, and text can spice up the presentation. Especially when it’s simple and bold.
The band and the website are no longer, but this was a very fun project and I wanted to show it. I was approached by a friend of mine that wanted a website for his band (he’s the guy in the green shirt). At the time, I was a Web Design Consultant and giving away my services on the side was frowned upon. We worked out a deal with my employer where we gave a little money to them and then I could make them a awesome website on the side.
I had already been dabbling in content management systems (CMS), which were revolutionizing the web world at the time (keep in mind, this was in 2002). So, I knew I was going to have a database drive the content. I had never done it before, so I decided the entire site would be in Macromedia Flash (Adobe hadn’t bought them yet).
This meant learning Flash ActionScript and the methods required to read from the database and get it into the Flash file. I also created a sliding style of moving from page to page. The image above will take you to a version of the page so you can see how the animation works (there is no data for it to read though). And, of course, the design was all mine. Working on band graphics really opens the door to some creative artwork.
We had a company newsletter that was for the clients of the company. I created this in 2005 and the publication has since changed names and I no longer work on the design/production of the piece. This is a full 8.5×11 flyer that opens booklet style, meant to be folded in half and be a self mailer. All of the content and images came from the Marketing Department, but the layout and graphics started with my ideas and were tweaked by Marketing input as we went along. This required coordination with print house to ensure the files were setup how they expect, as well as working with the Marketing Team.
I used Photoshop to process the images and InDesign to do the final layout and preflight for print.
I have used SQL Server’s TSQL to generate Excel spreadsheets from Vision data, our ERP, and then deliver the document to various employees. The data in the document is customized to that individual and there are multiple types of audiences that have different reasons for the report, thus need a customized version of it. Even better, Vision can schedule and run the TSQL to make all this happen.
But, I found a better way.
I rebuilt the reports in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The version available to me does not have the built-in dynamic scheduling capabilities, so I needed a plan b. I turned to the SSRS API and found that some simple C# .NET code could easily call a service and generate a report in various formats, and could accept arguments for the report parameters.
There are 4 versions of most reports that I create: Project Manager, Team Leader, Program Manager, and Management. All of these reports needed to be able to display customized data based on who was actually viewing the report. I easily found a way to pass in a URL based parameter to identify the proper employee data to display. This was really handy for the code, because code calls the report via a URL and I could easily supply each employee, one at a time and get all the reports I needed. With a lot of searching ,and trial and error, I found a tricky way to identify the person that is viewing the report in the browser. Not only could I use SSRS to generate these reports, the very same report can be used by all employees, showing them only the data they need versus all data.
This solution required C# .NET, Vision API, SSRS API, and a number of Views and Stored Procedures using TSQL on MS SQL Server 2008.
The ERP I work with is called Vision and is created by Deltek. This holds all the data for all departments in the company, including employee data. Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s repository of usernames and passwords that can access a network. But AD stores information about the employees which is then used for display in Outlook and Lync: Such as phone, mobile, address, title, name, supervisor, and so on. Having this information accurate is critical. Rather than creating some kind of procedure or policy to govern it, I created code.
I could create a custom workflow DLL using Vision’s API. The catch was, at the time, I had to go back to Visual Studio 2003 to do this, per the requirements of Vision. No problem: Microsoft will send me a copy and I can learn it quick. Using C# .NET, I was able to read the active employee list from Vision, impersonate a network administrator, query AD using LDAP, and match Vision employees to AD objects. Then it was a simple matter of determining what AD called the fields in code and just mapping in the appropriate data from Vision. (more…)