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Local Government Webmasters Meeting Presentations
Online Employee Directories
Paul Henderson, Information Technology Consultant, Thurston County
With hundreds of employees and contractors, as well as temporary and seasonal workers, Thurston County found that its printed directories became dated very quickly after their publication. For this and other reasons, they decided to create an online directory of Thurston County personnel and others.
For many years, Thurston County published, for internal use, a phone directory consisting of departmental/office/agency information, an alphabetical listing of employee names and phone numbers, and misc. related information. This directory was advertised as being published quarterly, but as might be expected, this quarterly activity was quite time consuming to update prior to each printing, quite costly to print all of the requested copies, and so typically a new printing would only happen once a year or even every other year. Initially, the paper directory was sent out for printing and binding, but was soon brought in house and 'converted' to a standard 8.5 x 11 format for duplicating on copy machines.
When it was decided to move the phone directory information onto the Intranet as a Web application, certain requirements were established:
- It had to retain the look of the paper directory in terms of information presentation.
- There was to be only one source for the directory information that would need to satisfy both the Web version and any printed copies if ever needed.
- All of the information in the current paper version needed to be available via the Web.
- The Web version needed to be able to support dynamic updates as often as needed.
- Search capabilities needed to be provided.
- The new phone directory was to be maintained as a clerical function, thus all Web functionality had to be database driven and automated; not the result of frequent Web programming changes.
- An employee could have more than one job, each in different departments/offices/agencies.
With these and other requirements in mind and working with the Admin staff that would maintain the data, both a Visual Basic maintenance interface to the database as well as numerous ASP pages pulling the data from the database and displaying it were created.
This Web application has won wide acceptance with county employees. Any printing that is now done is accomplished at the local level to accommodate those employees without ready access to a networked computer.
I plan on demonstrating both the VB maintenance interface as well as the Web application.
The directory, accessed through a Web browser, provides employees the ability to search by last name, department and other factors, and replaces the printed directories. Other features allow people to opt-in and have their photos displayed in the directory itself. Please contact Paul Henderson for more information.
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