Have I finally broken the thick black hard rock crust of Flash implementation possibility?

Here at the company I work for, the security of technology implementation is so strict we aren't even allowed to place icons in the quick start bar (even though we all do) due to the fact that there might be a possibility of failure of startup or some kind of error (never happens). They delete them remotely from time to time... Always use the start menu - programs - app menu to start an application. It doesn't stop there. There are so many procedures and steps that must be taken for anything to get implemented here, it's almost not worth it to even try unless one of the business users has *explicitly* requested it, and even then they had better be a high roller here or nobody would really listen to them.. For the past 2 years I've been preaching and implementing bit by bit Flash into our intranet. Creating more dynamic pages, pages with no refreshes, interactive pages, and a high level FCS application that was used in training for the bankers to understand buying and selling currencies. This wasn't a web based app, but it was of course created completely with Flash. With each and every one of these I was mocked at the ability of building something with flash.

To continue on from that we are now just finishing a project that we've been working on for the past year and a half that uses pretty much nothing but flash to teach the bankers (yes more training stuff..) how to sell certain banking products that we have. It's a really cool scheme and has also been translated over to 2 other languages (this does cost a *lot* of money, so great investment into a flash app here), so it's going to be huge when it hits global. Currently still only in Japan. Once again, in the beginning I had barely got approval to build this completely with flash. "Can't you build that with HTML?".... no.. you can't.

This brings me to the point of my post. Flash has a bad reputation. I mean a really really bad rep. Nobody thinks it's useful for anything other than annoying you with stupid intros, moving popup ads, and crap that they stick on the front page of yahoo that zooms across the screen and hinders your ability to actually read what the heck is there. I swear it gets worse everyday... Even against all that bad rep, slow and steady *good* implementations of Flash have turned my management around and opened their minds a bit more at what is now possible.

At first, when I would suggest creating something with flash to take advantage of some ability of it (no refreshes, slight animation to catch attention or whatever) I was almost laughed out the front doors of the company. They mocked the ability of using flash for anything that wouldn't annoy the users here, and that it couldn't possibly be any better than what you can already build with a good asp application with html. It did start slowly, but turned into a snowball effect I think. Once the ability of flash (combined with Coldfusion and Oracle) is seeable, I mean right in your face not just on paper or some powerpoint presentation, it really does have an effect. You can make things move, have data cache in the background without the user noticing (efficiency in the browser makes users happy). Save info for later in an SO maybe to save some choices they made, play nicely with XML, read in jpg's... This is already known to most I think, but the one thing I'm really impressed with is the effect that Flash has on people who were once critics.

I recently brought up another new idea for using flash except this time it wasn't for the intranet, I'm looking to get something going with FCS and a standalone app that would be converted from swf to exe with screenweaver. If I had suggested something like this about a year ago, there would be a pretty good chance I would have been not only laughed at, but most likely reprimanded for bringing up something so crappy. Using flash for an application! Unthinkable! Or so they thought, but once it's in your face.... The power is invigorating, keeps me on the track. Funny thing now is that when I suggest a flash page or app they now look at me very seriously and talk about the functions that can be implemented, and abilities that we can offer the users.

Chalk one up for flash in a corporate network, and soon FCS I hope.

Posted by Graeme at March 17, 2004 01:19 PM