/portfolio

Organization Tools - Version 1

Faceted browsing tool for org charts

Concept

While working as a manager in a distributed organization of about 450 people we found a problem keeping all of our distribution lists up to date. This problem was compounded by needing various permutations of the list, say "all users in Raleigh and Tucson that are part time or supplemental"

To help solve this problem I wrote an application that requests a top level manager as input, and builds a org chart in real time. The org chart can be filtered by a faceted browsing control which allows the user to pare down the chart to only certain people.

The user can then create a distribution list, with a single click, which includes only the people intended.

Implementation

The application was written in DHTML and Javascript. It uses Ajax calls to query the enterprise directory and recurse through the organization from the top level manager to include every employee.

The final org chart page is created through a GET request, so a user can bookmark the chart for a frequently used organization and still get the most up-to-date chart.