The World with XML

I would like to say, If everything I know is in xml, this world would be a better place!!! Everything is structured. I can understand it, you can understand it, even the machine can understand it. There’ll be no issue in interoperability. One can work with any data in their own way. I don’t have to worry about my language of liking, as they all understand XML. How I wish everything is in XML. Everybody will be free from the chain of any legacy. It’s my data, so I should have every right to control it, not some program that would bound me to do my bidding in their way. XML.

Shift Reporting Service

This is a power generation company, so we have a few Power Plants of our own; at the same time we are the operator of these plants. So we have many shifts; and at the end of each shift a report is generated. So all this while the way these documents are prepared is with MS Word, and dumped into a NAS. This was cool back in 2000, but not so now.
This is kinda outside of EALIS Seek development, but it is still related to web development. Anyhow, few months ago we implemented Sharepoint, for an online claim system. Yeah I know sharepoint for the sake of claims; we do have some money to burn; in the name of advancement and ease of claims.
The Claims system is suppose to be operational, but I haven’t have access to it just yet, both Claims System and Sharepoint. There using sharepoint + infopath. I’ve seen a glance of the form on infopath just haven’t used it. No of the people I know, have ever used it.
Anyhow the boss asked me to do some work to get a proper Shift Reporting System. Since SharePoint is in the picture, why not use it. By year end the plan was to get a sharepoint license for each staff, so access will be made possible throughout the company. Few weeks ago I’ve attended a basic training on Sharepoint, point out to the trainer on our intention with SRS;
His feed back was;
1. Just use Sharepoint as a dumping ground like NAS – User will still prepare their document in their own way: hence no resistance, the only change will be on the dumping side: expect little resistance. The only upside of this is that sharepoint is more structured and there’s a crawler. But in essence, this is just like using NAS only prettier. Information is not properly structured here, content is just being crawled into a bunch of text; no substance.
2. Use Sharepoint + Infopath – This how we did it for claims, so it is a good way to go… right. Not according to the trainer; he advised against this because according to him [he said don't quote him; since no one is reading this who cares] infopath 2007 will be the last iteration of infopath, as the function will be absorbed to sharepoint webforms. Does make sense to me. So no point in developing something that will last 3 years. Then there’s the problem of resistance from end user; as it is very different from preparing a word document. There’s also problem on fetching historic data.
3. Use Sharepoint + asp.net + webforms – This is the most difficult way to go; but it is more flexible. One of my requirement for the forms is that it must resemble the experience of working with ms word, to achieve this there is one key ingredient; historic data. I expect user can reload the forms with data from previous report, and amend the changes onto the historic data and save it as a new document. This one requirement has made option 3 as the only viable option.

Those are his 3 recomendations

4. I can write webforms on asp add with some ajax. Historic data fetching is achievable; but this route will surely greeted with resistance on end user side as the experience is entirely different. I don’t one to develop anything that no one use. On top of that it will be ugly.

After giving some serious thought the first idea came back to mind: dumping document into Sharepoint; but this time a custom crawler will be written to crawl the document back.

Sidetrack, ever since office 2007, in compliance with world order every office doc are in pure XML files. How bout that, and this files are enclosed in a zip file and named docx, xlsx etc. So you can actually unzip these files and get their XML content. This will be helpful in gathering data without infopath or sharepoint.

Since end user will still prepare document like they always do, there will be no resistance; there’s a few new kinks though;
- the must use office 2007
- they must not change document structure
- they must refrain themselves from excess formating, might mess original structure.
The only change to the original workflow now is instead of dumping to NAS, we dump it to sharepoint; little resistance.

see part 2