In the end it's the presentation of the app that counts (thanks flash!)

Well have I got an interesting story with a happy ending. It's a flash story :)

It's a bit of a .... no.. it's a damn long long story (now that I have finished writing it..) as the beginning stuff is actually needed to understand the full weight of the ending so if you haven't the time then just imagine that Flash is the devil of devils in the beginning but ends up being the saviour of all... or some other kind of mushy weird analogy like that. :) Some background stuff if you will:

I took over the intranet here at work about 2 years ago. At that time it was administrated by one guy, updated by hand, and was ALL html. There was absolutely no back end and nothing moved unless it was an animated gif, even at that it most likely just a little "new" gif or something lame like that.

So my goal at that time was to at the very least start making some parts work with a back-end (especially the staff list, I can't believe that was all written by hand). So I was allowed to install Oracle, get some asp pages up and messed with the design from there to make it a bit easier on the eyes. While designing, I took a look at a lot of sites on the net and of course Flash really caught my eye. Pretty much being a beginner at HTML in general (I ooohhhed and aahhhed at font tags...), I had never even heard of flash and immediately jumped into a few books and in time found myself hanging out over at Flashkit looking at all the tutes on flash there. Which lead me to Ultrashock and so on and so on...

Of course being the "enterprise" company that we are, Flash was not readily accepted and I had to keep my interests in Flash more of a hobby than something I could actually use at work. In time I managed to add a flash menu that "moved"... wow! the effect it had on people at that time (especially me hahahaha). Some people were blown away that something like that was possible, others a little more practical or knowledgable in web stuff immediately found it useless eye candy. So that brought about the "modified menu" that didn't move and was already open to what most people used. ho hum..

At that time I got a small request from one of the product departments that wanted a "Latest Nav data" which is the latest pricing on certain products that they offer. Well, here was another great opportunity for flash because they actually already had an animated gif (which didn't move very smoothly ...hmmm.. it sucked actually) So I immediately went off to create a little "radar" looking app that went over really really well and things took off from there. It moved, and was useful and not in the way of people getting to info they wanted.

By this time I was ready to move on to the next version of our intranet to keep up with corporate standards and branding, and another department took advantage of this time to request a new page that would show their products and information in a bit more of a dynamic way. They wanted a ticker running across the bottom and buttons that moved when you moused over them, jumping animations.... Well this lead to a disaster and that page was actually rebuilt within 6 months to the version it is at currently that incorporates much more backend DB stuff and Coldfusion remoting (getting Coldfusion here is another messy story that I won't get into here... MM, you guys need a better reputation ;) ). To get this far though was like getting water from a rock and was not fun in anyway at all. Constant complaints from upper management, sneers as they walk by saying in a way "there's no way that'll go anywhere", and "flash sucks, only good for annoying animations". Frustrating stuff.

So you get the idea I think. This brings us on to our next project that started about a year and half ago. I've mentioned this project in past posts here so I'll just touch on it briefly. It was a project to create learning material for the sales people to understand the products we have and why they work the way they do. Good points and bad points, when to sell and comparing to what will it do well, kind of idea. For this it required simulations, multimedia factors, ineractiveablity, and a great presentation front (even though there is some backend work involved). I immediately brought up Flash for the job. I got the usual "you only want to use flash because you like it.." crap, but was in luck on this one because the department head that brought up this project also likes Flash and helped me convince my boss that Flash was the way to go.

So off we went on this project that was supposed to only last about 5 months. The first thing we needed was people who could build it. I did the framework, interface and backend of the app but we needed somebody (or more than one person) to build the actually product simulations. The material. You wouldn't believe how long it took to find somebody who could actually do it... why are there so few good flash designers/developers out there.. especially in Japan. We ended up getting 2 people (who I ended up training..). Throughout the whole time though, the project was belittled, sneered at, and in general just left to itself to finish up. Why? because we were using Flash... talk about a bad rep.

Anyways, that project finished up last month. It took 1 and half years. We ended up hiring another 3 people in total to help in the end, and not only that it has been translated into 2 other languages (we're a global company) at the cost of the technology department (the guys that do the sneering). But even with all this help from upper management in the end, you could tell that it still took a lower rung on the ladder of importance as they had hired cheap temporary people, and also outsourced quite a bit to cheap cheap China. Economically it's good I suppose, but you get what you pay for really.. which created more work for us here to push for higher quality overall.

Just before that project finished up, there was another new page that was going to be going up (our department!) and the boss wanted an organization chart of our department of about 30 people. The cheap cheap company wanted to put up some pics with arrows on it (maybe powerpoint...) so in I jumped again with a neat idea to use video. Each person would only have about 1 sec to turn from their comp to the camera and smile. This all over the place I think, and I thought I'd take advantage of that idea on the intranet for the organization chart. I rounded up a few people who weren't camera shy and built this little Flash app to show my boss. He liked it and we went full out on it to have it ready for the production day. It runs off of an XML backend so updates are easy, and it is multilingual. A success if I do say so myself. But of course in the beginning that "we hate flash" eyeing was all over the place. Getting used to it by now though and haven't failed yet (well just that once...) so we pushed it through and it became a hit throughout the department with giggles coming from cubicles all around.

So here's the happy ending (finally). The head of Technology for the whole of the company (not just Japan), and I'm talking the big cheese of the big cheese, seems to be in town this week, and my boss proceeds to brag about all the accomplishments we've made here. It just so happened that I had walked by his office at this time when they were looking at some stuff, and there was this ooohhing and aaaahhhing so I put an ear out to hear what they were talking about and it was the Flash designed and developed organization chart. The big cheese starts asking all kinds of questions as to how it was built and they had a fun filled time mousing over peoples pics which would then turn into video and the person would face the camera. I walked off to what I was doing at the time thinking "cool, seems to be going well" and didn't think much of it after that. About an hour later I was called into my bosses office and heartily commended for the Flash work that I have done up until this point. Talk about irony.. but a happy ending for all I think. This gives me a great stepping stone for the next FCS app that I have on mind (and have been given the go ahead to start preliminary dev docs to present to the boss for approval).

And that's it. A long read but goes to prove that it's the presentation of the app that is extremely important. Sometimes you gotta break the rules to make new ones. You can't do that kind of stuff with html and animated gifs or even DHTML. Of course the head of tech doesn't know that we used multiple apps that aren't standard here, which is bad bad, but it stood out in his eyes and he was impressed. That impression goes well for my boss, and of course down to myself and my team. Kudos to all involved. Hopefully the next app goes just as well.

Posted by Graeme at March 31, 2004 03:11 PM