Development Portfolio

Case Study:

Healthspan Intranet (2007)

Polymorphic Products

Examples of technology created by Paul Tinsley

Products change over time and so do information demands. Healthspan needed product information to be malleable over time, not just from the content perspective, but also in quantity and scope.

I was the sole designer, coder and web master for the Healthspan Intranet and this presentation focuses on one of its powerful and scalable content management aspects.

I developed an inline Content Management System (CMS) that allowed any number of text segments to be associated with any product and given a special scope. This allowed staff to detail whatever data they required for any product, manage that data and even limit access to the data according to an individual’s security access privileges at the singular or group level.

The system was coded in ASP.Net in a simple text editor from the ground up over an SQL Server 2000 database, rendered in X/HTML and CSS, targeting Internet Explorer. The system had over 200 users distributed over a WAN.

First, we take a look at a product and how it’s data may be edited.

Then we create a new Product Description for the product.

Finally, we show how access may be restricted to the new Product Description.

We access the “Brain Boosters” product to examine the related data subjects or Product Descriptions.

Notice that the Intranet covers many information topics for staff to collaborate over.

Our security privileges allow us to edit products, so an edit hyperlink is visible.

We decide to edit the “Intranet Description”.

We may now edit the Description, either visually using the 3rd party WYSIWYG editor, or directly by entering HTML.

That’s given us a taste of how the system looks and how we edit a Product Description.

Now let’s look at adding a new Product Description to extend the features of this product …

This button allows us to generate a new Product Description.

We can now provide the new content.

We can specify if the content is Text or HTML.

We can associate the Description with a pre-defined context.

After updating the new Description, we can now see that it has become part of the Product’s content. So we have extended the data points for this product and we can use the scope of this data point to generate output elsewhere in the system, such as a data export to a web site.

Now let’s take a look at altering my security privileges, so that I am no longer able to view and edit this type of data …

We need to access my Staff Profile.

Because I currently have the security privilege to administer other security privileges, a hyperlink to edit privileges is exposed on my profile.

We can edit my security privileges here.

These are my current security groups.

These are my current atomic security access privileges. Collections of these are wrapped up into the Access Groups above. An atomic privilege can limit access to a specific web page, specific data point, or just hide a section within a page from view.

Now update my security privileges.

Remove the Product Administrator group.

Also remove the visibility access to additional Product Descriptions.

I no longer have access to the Product Description created earlier.

We have seen a small example of how product data could be edited, augmented and secured.

This is just one small facet of quite a complex but highly scalable approach to managing the varying data requirements of the Healthspan products.

End of Presentation