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October 25, 1999

Digital Dashboard Offers Little Light
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Like the Office Web Components that ship with Office 2000, the Outlook View Control provides a rich subset of its parent application from within Internet Explorer. You can double-click a message, a contact, or a calendar item to open it, or right-click to select options from a context-sensitive menu. Categories can be exposed, sorted, and filtered to ease searches and context-tagging.

Dashboard developers can start from scratch or modify the example code, using scripting to add personalization to team folders. For example, the document library example shows how to add buttons that navigate to different folders, apply default folder views that show only unread items, and launch documents in their originating application. The Office Chart component works in one example to track call response times in a help-desk scenario, and the Excel PivotTable component connects to SQL Server 7's online analytical processing services for dynamic data modeling.

Though users comfortable with FrontPage can author Digital Dashboards, the Starter Kit is aimed at IT, and, for IT's convenience as well as Microsoft's, the customization presumes everyone in a department will run a closely similar Dashboard. Microsoft recommends building a base Dashboard that includes a set of nuggets from which users can choose, or programmers can allow deployment based on centrally defined roles. The kit installs a Component Object Model add-in into FrontPage 2000 that lets you include the Outlook View Control from a menu item, and it provides an Outlook Today customization tool that makes it easy to point Outlook at your Digital Dashboard application.

Digital Dashboards take advantage of their Outlook 2000 host to enable offline usage, but you don't get the single-store capability of the Notes client. Outlook replicates collaborative data from Exchange public folders, but folder home pages require the Internet Explorer Synchronization Agent to cache Web pages. Outlook automatically starts the agent after synchronizing with Exchange, but Internet Explorer's HTML replication can be hampered by network unreliability. This is more than an inconvenience; it brings into question the Digital Dashboard's utility in a critical setting and undermines its deployment in certain departments.

There are security irritations, too. To display the Digital Dashboard in Outlook without triggering ActiveX security warnings, the application disables browsing security for the Outlook Today page and folder home pages. When you click a link and navigate to any other page, browsing security is reactivated, preventing access to the Outlook object model and disallowing access to ActiveX controls. This clunky solution fails altogether when users navigate from a subframe of a page because security is not enabled-a security hole that IT implementors must design around. Again, it undermines this good idea's appeal, this time in companies that have strong security concerns.

Similarly, some pages that render correctly in Internet Explorer won't do so when displayed in the custom Outlook Today page. Frameset and iframe tags don't function as expected, and forms and tabular data controls don't work correctly. You can configure Outlook to host the full version of Internet Explorer, but you lose the performance enhancements provided by the subset of the browser's features included in the Outlook Today Dynamic Link Library. This will cause trouble for departments that make frequent use of tables they consider important.

These issues underline the value proposition of this first release of the Digital Dashboard framework. Exchange 2000 makes it possible to avoid the Outlook client for all but its offline tools, letting developers deliver applications to a single browser client that businesses are defining as a key strategic goal. The Outlook View Control requires Outlook to be present on the desktop, where Exchange 2000 delivers Dynamic HTML, XML, and XSL Outlook Web Access from the server.

The coup de grace is worse; the deployment weaknesses embodied by the kit are two business realities IT can least afford. The first is the staffing shortage. Most IT shops say they can't hire all the qualified staff they need, and this product requires qualified staff to implement it, even just to customize it to the level of one Dashboard configuration per department. That model, as useful as it might be, is nowhere near as productive as a model that supported personalization, a subtly different Dashboard for each individual user. Personalization could only come about if Microsoft provided tools for users to customize Dashboards to their own needs. A developed model they might choose to imitate is Optika Inc.'s eMedia, a customizable extranet construction kit that does a great job of intelligent customization. The third party that helped design this in the first place, InfoCal LLC, is providing a tool aimed at supporting self-service customization where users can select, move, and add nuggets to their Dashboards, but we didn't have time to test it.

The second IT weakness that makes Dashboard difficult to implement is that it depends critically on the soft underbelly of almost all U.S. IT shops: user-interface design. While IT departments have always been critically thin in the area of user-interface design talent, the downsizing cult winnowed far too many good designers in the last decade.

Despite technical and staffing concerns, which don't affect all companies, there's great virtue in the idea. If you have good user-interface talent, or if you have low staff turnover (so you can better amortize the expense of extensive training of users in the vagaries of a mediocre interface), the Microsoft implementation of Digital Dashboard with a soup�on of your own design could have a fantastic payback. The product also makes sense for companies that intend to use Exchange and Office 2000, but not upgrade to the next version of Exchange.

The Exchange 2000 release, once installed, will make a lot of IT effort in Digital Dashboard technically obsolete. There may be some tactical applications that will solve sharply defined, immediate problems quickly. In those cases, deployment seems to make sense. But throwing a lot of resources at Digital Dashboard as part of a strategic initiative doesn't look like a good investment for shops determined to take advantage of Exchange 2000's benefits, since development costs will largely be lost when the new software comes.

You could, perhaps, execute a careful implementation strategy that would maximize preservation of Digital Dashboard efforts. This could involve building a parallel implementation running on Internet Explorer 5 that takes advantage of its existing XML and DHTML support, then adding client detection code that would branch to Outlook's Dashboard for intranet use while offering remote and occasionally connected users a dial-up thin client. Even so, you run the risk of completing your work just in time to start your Exchange 2000 efforts.

There is, however, one scenario that would encourage some rollout of Digital Dashboard-it's a chance to play with the mix of technologies, the interaction of messaging, desktop applications, pushed Web content, discussion groups, and access to back-end data, all within a single application. It's a swell, worthwhile promise that looks exciting on the surface. But so was Microsoft Bob.

Steve Gillmor is director of Southern Digital Inc., a Charleston, S.C., IT consulting firm. He can be reached at sgillmor@southerndigital.com. Jeff Angus is a senior technology editor InformationWeek.

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