We’ve been looking at the calendar element of Engage for a while and considering how we could improve both its utility and its visual design. Currently, when you start getting multiple events on a given day the display starts to break. We wanted a clearer way to display busy calendars, but also to look at the fundamentals a bit more, could we refocus the page to make it more useful?

With this in mind we’ve taken a look at a number of options for improving the default styling for the calendar. None of these have been implemented, they’re just mockups at the moment, but they’ll give you an idea of the various approaches we could take. We’ve used some real data, as that gives an authentic example of how a calendar might appear. Actual look and feel for whichever option we decides to implement will be theme-able to your particular instance.

We’d love to have some feedback from you on these options.

Option 1 – Better columns.

This is by far the simplest option for the calendar, rather than scroll the individual boxes, allow them to expand for full viewing of a busy day. Combine this with a more solid vertical rhythm of the calendar text and it should be clearer to scan. This does mean the page will need to scroll if you have lots of events in a month and this makes the calendar lose its ability to give an instant overview as some items will be “below the fold”. It does result in a clearer listing and avoids wrapped text being hidden, as it is currently.

Option 2 – Detail on hover

This option truncates the basic display to the first three events and provides a hoverstate that shows more detail. This allows for a more compact summary, that still gives a hint at event density. The disadvantage is that the full detail requires an extra interaction, and items appearing further don’t the list are not instantly visible and need to be browsed to.

Although this example requires javascript for the hover state, the page is fully usable without.

Option 3 – Diary View

This option takes a broader view of the function of the calendar. Rather than trying to display every event, it breaks things down so that we have two panels. One panel for a smaller indicative calendar that acts as navigation and persists through pages. The other panel that shows a summary of the current days events, with both title and summary. This is more a diary view than a calendar view.

This a big shift from the calendar with all events linked from the first page, but it has a number of distinct advantages. The first is a focus on the current day when you enter the calendar, allowing a clearer view of event summaries and current activities, especially useful when an events title is not self-describing. The mini-calendar also provides a stronger navigational element that gives a clear indication of the current day/month/year that you are browsing. The mini-calendar also gives you an indication of event density in a particular month, though not that of a particular day.

Assuming the default view of the diary is the current day, you would sometimes have no events to display. However, an empty day could be used as an opportunity to highlight other upcoming events.

Option 4 – Calendar Widget

This final option is a more dramatic shift from the previous calendar than the other options. It treats the calendar area as a widget that pans around the data. If you click the link for the next week, it slides in from the right rather than loading a new page. This reduces the initial information dump, and allows for a more desktop-like experience of browsing between weeks and months. The default view in this setup is also week-based, which offers a good compromise on showing lots of data without the page being overloaded.

We can also make the process of paging nice and smooth by pre-loading the next and previous pages in the background. Again, this option requires Javascript, but in the event it isn’t present the system falls back to a more traditional link-based, page refreshing approach.

Where to go from here?

Each of these options provides for a different approach to making the data of the event calendar more digestible and cleaner visually, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. We’d love feedback on which you think would suit your users and the data you have on your systems best.

Talis Engage Release 21 has been deployed to the preview site, and is available for testing.
It will be deployed to live on 16th Feb 2011.

This release includes improvements to searching, new functionality to allow results to be easily printed, export and display improvements and some small bug fixes.

Broader and Narrower Subjects Display on Search Results
When a user selects a subject via the Browse page the results show any broader or narrower subjects as facets. These faceted subjects are now displayed in alphabetic order.
Improvements to Searching

Searching With Apostrophes

When searching for terms with apostrophes in, the apostrophe will be ignored. Therefore, searching for “Ardens” will produce the same result at searching for “Arden’s”.

Spelling Correction
When a search term returns no results the application will now attempt to suggest an alternative spelling for the search term entered. Where an alternative can be derived it will be displayed with the ‘Did You Mean:’ caption. The suggested value will display as a hyperlink and clicking on it will display the results for the suggested value. For example, searching for the term ‘organisation’ will yield a suggestion ‘Did You Mean:organisation ‘ if no results are found.

Print Search Results
There is now an option to print selected records from the results of a search. Each record displayed in the results set has an accompanying checkbox to allow it to be selected. In addition a ‘Select all’ checkbox is provided at the top of the results page. A user can now select any or all of the displayed records by checking the appropriate boxes. This selection is then ‘saved’ by clicking on the ‘Save Selection’ button at the end of the displayed records. Clicking the new ‘View & Print’ button will then display a page formatted for printing. The full details of the selected records will be included on the formatted page. The user can then click on the web browser print icon to print the results. A ‘Back to results’ link will allow a user to navigate back to the results page.
User Account Export
The users email address is now included in the csv file generated when an export of user details is performed.

Bug Fixes

Failing Suggestions
In some cases it was not possible for users to send suggestions about records that had no values in fields that had been added to the record type since the record was entered. This only applied to fields of type calendar, hyperlink and address that had been added to the record type and where the records had some role restrictions. This has now been fixed.

Index management
Previously when an index that had been used on a record type was deleted, it was not possible to assign an alternative index to the field. This has now been enabled.

Dead link Report Performance
The report failed to generate when too many dead links were found. This has been resolved.
To preview the new functionality before the full release, visit http://trial1.talis.com/engage, and log in as SysAdmin (password engage).
Any feedback or suggestions are welcome.

Building on the success of the monthly releases for Talis Engage, we are delighted to host a free Talis Engage user day here at Talis offices on the 17 May 2011.

Talis Engage as a product is aimed at speaking to the Digital Inclusion agenda that faces Local Authorities in the UK; it provides a means to engage with your communities and putting the citizen at the centre of community information.

With this in mind we welcome you to share your experiences with the rest of the group. The day will consist of the following activities:

• The user experience; share your experiences with other local authorities who use Engage
• Would you like to see where you can take Talis Engage
• Development roadmap, Talis’ plans
• Have your say; feed into future development plans for Engage

Register your free place now.

Talis Engage Release 17 has been deployed to the preview site, and is available for testing.

It will be deployed to live on Wednesday 15th September 2010.

This release adds functionality for exporting user and contact details, deleting subjects from the taxonomy, displaying scope notes for subjects, and improving the indexing of sites by search engines. In addition, there are some changes to the workflow for record owners when checking records, and some minor bug fixes.

Exporting User and Contact Details

User and contact details can now be exported from the User Account & Contact Management page (only available to users with appropriate permissions). The export button will appear with the results of a search (use a blank search term to see all users or contacts).  The details will be downloaded as a CSV file, with separate fields for all parts of the name and address, and fields for email addresses and phone numbers (for contacts) or roles (for users). These exported files should be usable in mail merges external to the system.

Note, the Export function will currently only provide the first 100 search results – let us know if this restriction will need to be addressed.

Deleting Subjects from the Taxonomy

Subjects can now be deleted from the taxonomy. The functionality is disabled by default – you’ll need to check the checkbox labelled “Enable subject deletion” in Tenancy Management to enable it. Once you’ve done that, delete icons will appear on the Taxonomy Management pages next to each subject. When clicked, the system will prompt the user before deleting the subject. There is a restriction on subject deletion – a subject can only be deleted if it has no narrower terms (because they would be left “orphaned” in the hierarchy). The system will also  prompt the user before deletion if the subject is associated with some records (though it will still allow the subject to be deleted if you click “OK”, removing the associations from any records at the same time).

We haven’t yet addresses the issue of deleting subjects in bulk – that’s something we’ll be looking at in future releases.

Note, there is currently a delay when saving changes to the Tenancy Management settings whilst the effects of the changes are reflected in cached system data. We’ll be addressing the performance of the page as a priority in the next release.

Displaying Scope Notes

Scope notes attached to subjects should now be displayed as a tooltip when a subject appears on the “Broader Terms” or “Narrower Terms” panels that appear with search results.

Improved Search Engine Indexing

When search engines index a site, they make use of a “sitemap” file (if provided), which directs them to specific parts of the site from which to begin the indexing – in our case, that’s the subjects and tags pages. The sitemap is different for each site, and is now generated dynamically from the site content, so that it’s always up to date. That should give more focused coverage to the results obtained from search engines.

Record Owner Workflow when Checking Records

In the previous release, the Next Check Date of a record would be incremented whenever the record was edited. However, the workflow actually required that the Next Check Date was only incremented when the record was explicitly marked as checked, using the “Mark as checked” link, and not during normal edits. That’s been changed in this release – the Next Check Date will only increment when the “Mark as checked” link is clicked.

In addition, a Record Owner can now edit a record that they are flagged as owning even if they wouldn’t normally have record edit permissions. Note, at this stage they won’t have Copy or Delete permissions on the record, which are normally reserved for users with the full create and edit roles. And the record owner will not see the Record State tab whilst editing, because that is controlled by the “Manage Record State” role. If these restrictions cause difficulties, then we will review the functionality in future releases.

Fixes

This release addresses a number of issues that have been raised by our users. The Next Check Date reports were timing out in some cases – the performance of the report has been improved (the handling of error messages when there HAS been an error will be addresses in the next release). The User & Contact Management page was displaying roles inconsistently for some searches, and Users were being included in searche results even Contacts had been specified for the search. The editing of Subject names has been fixed, so that you can change the case of the name, for example.  Finally, the CSV encoding of the Next Check Reports was inconsistent (fields containing commas needed to be wrapped in quotes) .

To preview the new functionality before the full release, visit http://trial1.talis.com/engage, and log in as SysAdmin (password engage).

And, as usual, please let us know your thoughts on these and any other issues.

Talis Engage Release 16 has been deployed to the preview site, and is available for testing.

It will be deployed to live on Wednesday 18th August 2010.

This release contains new functionality to automatically inform record owners when their records have passed their Next Check Dates, to support the record checking workflow, and fixes to issues with display of pending suggestions, saving searches, and taxonomy management.

Next Check Dates

Record owners will now receive emails when a record they own has passed its Next Check Date. The emails will be generated nightly, and any records that have passed their dates in the last 24 hours will trigger notifications. A summary of the notifications will be delivered as a report to the Report Management page (but will be regenerated each night, overwriting the previous one). The records themselves have an additional action (“Mark as checked”) available to users with appropriate editing permissions, so that they can mark a record as checked without needing to make any edits. If they use that link, or if they make some modifications to the record, then the Next Check Date will be increased by the number of days specified in the Tenancy Management pages. The emailing functionality is configurable in Tenancy Management, so you can choose when to enable it. The email subject and message text is also configurable, to allow system administrators to give more detailed instructions to record owners.

Pending Suggestions

Some customers noted that suggestions for alterations that had been submitted by users were all visible to editors, even if those editors weren’t owners of the records in question – that has been fixed in this release.

Saving Searches

Any user who is logged in will now be able to save searches (though, unless they’re an Admin, they’ll only be able to see their own searches from the Advanced Search page).

Taxonomy Management

We’ve made the loading of the subject hierarchy much quicker – not something that most users will see under normal circumstances, but it will make a difference if the cached hierarchy is ever cleared from the .

To preview the new functionality before the full release, visit http://trial1.talis.com/engage, and log in as SysAdmin (password engage).

And, as usual, please let us know your thoughts on these and any other issues.

Talis Engage Release 15 has been deployed to the preview site, and is available for testing.

It will be deployed to live on Wednesday 21st July 2010.

This release mainly contains fixes to issues which have been reported with display of calendar events, deadlink reporting, and search and facet functions.

Calendar Events

Some calendar events that spanned many days were not displaying on one of those days – that’s been fixed, along with improvements to the validation of newly-created calendar events (preventing end dates that are earlier than start dates, for example). In addition, copied records were not displaying calendar events correctly – that’s also been fixed.

Deadlink Reporting

The regular testing of links in records to identify invalid ones was flagging links as invalid if they included redirects, leading to links being incorrectly reported as broken. Now the tests will follow redirects in the links until the final page is arrived at, or until a genuine error is discovered. (Note, this fix will only be evident when the deadlink report runs next, on the 15th August – if you need to see the results sooner, let us know).

Search and Facet

Some specific facets were causing errors to be reported (“ward”, for example), and some characters in searches were causing problems (a colon preceded by a space, for example). Both of those errors have been fixed. More work is planned to refine the way that the searches handle wildcards and other non-alphanumeric characters.

Finally, we’ve been working to improve our importing of records from file – we expect this work to carry on over the next few releases as a background improvement.

To preview the new functionality before the full release, visit http://trial1.talis.com/engage, and log in as SysAdmin (password engage).

And, as usual, please let us know your thoughts on these and any other issues.

We’d like to get your thoughts on an issue we’re working on at the moment – deleting subjects from the taxonomy.

Currently, it’s not possible to delete subjects – they can be hidden, but they’re still in the system. We’ll be introducing a new function for deleting them completely, which will remove the subject and any reference to it from records or from other subjects.

But that raises several questions:

• Should the system allow you to delete subjects that are associated with records?
• Should you be informed that a subject is associated with records before confirming (or cancelling) the deletion?
• Subjects can have narrower terms – should they also be deleted, or should they be left as “orphans”?
• Is deleting subjects one at a time going to be too slow for practical use, or does that system need to allow bulk deletes?
• If you can delete multiple subjects at the same time, how should the system warn you about associated records (which may be a very big list)?

We’ll be starting to work on this very soon, so any thoughts that you have about the way deletions should work, or how you want to use them, would be welcome.

Please add comments to this blog post, or email us at danisha.bathia@talis.com