Spinning Cube in Smart Office
Nov 04 2013
The ComActivity Tech Team Challenge
An out-of-hours undertaking by our amazing development team.
The Challenge: Imagine, and use .NET to develop a graphical enhancement to be run in Smart Office that interfaces directly to M3. Focus on creativity and technical skill – stretch the boundaries to see what can be achieved.
Here is one team’s solution.
Team: George, Jasper, Liang and Gunjan
The Spinning Cube
For sheer out-of-the-box thinking, we think this concept takes the prize. It looks slick and demonstrates a really clever and engaging way of displaying several pieces of information simultaneously. Their solution was a 3-d “Spinning Cube”.
As team leader George Zagas said, “We are really excited about the way we have shown that by using C# it ‘s possible to present anything you like alongside Smart Office, and it doesn’t matter if it comes from M3, Comflow or anything on the web”
What we love
The simultaneous access to M3 data that normally requires several functions. In the first version of the cube, the team presents different graphs on each face of the spinning cube…
- A bar graph showing – “Quantities Projected and Onhand Balance”
- A pie chart showing “Quantities across different warehouses”
- A line chart showing “Available to promise over time”
- A bubble chart example.
As they say – a picture tells a thousand words, and in a matter of seconds, this widget easily delivers information that would normally take up to a few minutes to access and absorb.
The range of applications. The information that can be presented in this way is limitless – it can come from M3, Comflow (aka ComActivity BPP), or any SQL data base. As the team considered the possible practical applications of this, they realised they could deliver a range of handy information via webservices. So for example, someone in a multi-region business could quickly access time zones. Or other information such as currencies, weather or traffic status…
The slider. As an added bit of icing on the cake, the team also included a slider which allows a user to change the revolution speed of the the spinning cube. They are also excited about other possibilities, such as utilizing audio – either to transmit information or command the widget.
All this was achieved via C# and clever use of Infor’s M3 APIs, and incorporated the Weather and Time zones Information from Yahoo’s website.
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