Design: Sun Extranet
Summary: An early move into the portal space (late 1998), ATG designed and implemented a Web-based application which allowed Sun personnel to create and assign members to Web Centers on an arbitrary basis, and allowed Web Center members to post complex content, search through posted content, and communicate with other Center members in a variety of ways.
Problem context: ATG was asked to design an intensely personalized Extranet system for Sun employees, vendors and customers. Sun needed a way to foster communication and information-sharing among a wide set of diverse user groups. A sprawling company, Sun wanted to automate the process of disseminating information among these user groups as well as give them a way to feed their own useful content into the Sun universe.
Project goal: ATG and Sun collaborated to find requirements, set functionality, design the user experience, and implement a Web-based application that allowed Sun personnel to create and assign members to individual Extranets, called Web Centers, on an arbitrary basis. Web Center members would be able to author complex content, publish and unpublish it to Web Center members, search through published content, and communicate with other Center members in a variety of ways.
Target audience: A wide range of Sun employees, resellers, and customers, who had a mutual need to research or author information related to Sun.
My role: Participated in the creative team which identified and specified business and user requirements; led development of all functionality and UI design. Led implementation of UI code using ATG Dynamo JHTML with engineers and designers.
View screen shots:
Note: While ATG designed the functionality, UI, and technical architecture for this application, the Sun branding department provided the final visuals, color palette, and type treatment.
Web Center Home
A Web Center is created by personnel at Sun for interest groups among their clients and vendors. Here is the Web Center for vendors involved in Sun's Web site. This Web Center home provides the gateway to all Content and Folders and other community features of that Web Center.
Folder View
Any individual Web Center contains an arbitrary number of Folders, which can contain other Folders as well as individual pieces of Content. Here, a user looks at a set of Folders and Content within another Folder. Note also that each Folder supports a discussion group. Furthermore, this user has permissions to add both Content and Folders to the current Folder. If the user did not have permissions, the "Add" links would not appear.
Content View
Users may create pieces of Content which are then viewed by other members of the Web Center. Content contains meta information and may contain any of the following: text, images, questionnaires, documents, and Dynamo code. The user gets this media into the Content by either typing it in or uploading it from his/her desktop.
Content View 2
A Content piece with only text.
Content View 3
A Content piece where a user may download a document which the Content creator uploaded.
Edit Content
Users may make edits to a piece of content which they've previously created. In this case, the user is adding an image to a previously created content.
Edit Content
Here, the user is editing the meta information attached to a piece of content.
View User Profile
Users may view the profiles of other users in a Web Center. An individual may also, of course, manage the information in a profile as well as hide elements of the portfolio from other users.
Search Content
Users may search through a Web Center's available content by a number of a criteria.