Manage Queue Membership: Making It Easier
Dovetail Software, Inc. recently recently received a request from one of our customers to make Queue Membership Management easier and more efficient to use. The screen image to the left shows the Manage Queues form in Dovetail Admin, Version 2.5. When a queue is selected at the top of the form, its current members and supervisors are displayed at the bottom right of the Membership tab.
Adding or changing members and supervisors was done one by one, and with only the login name for each user to determine the identity of each user. The login names are unique, but it can be hard to tell users apart based on login name alone.
The new requested functionality to make queue management easier includes adding the first and last name for each user, and allowing multiple users to be added or removed at one time.
The new version of the screen shows the changes. There is now more information for each user, and the checkboxes on each row of the grids give an indication that multiple users can be moved at the same time.
Users are selected by clicking on each row in the grids. The arrow keys in the middle of the tab are still used to add the selected users to the desired groups, and all of the business rules still apply to each one of the selected users.
From the administrator’s point of view, the forms don’t look much different other than the first and last names, but the added functionality will make member management easier. That was the real goal.
The other interesting part is what it looks like from a developer’s point of view. Changing the functionality of the forms is an opportunity to update the technology, and in this case it makes a big difference. For more details on the development and a look at some of the code, take a look behind the user interface and read this post.
