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The Intranet

Max Planck Electronic Information Desk (MEID)

The institute recognized early the big potential of the html/http standards to efficiently organize the internal flow of information. Therefore, the Max Planck Electronic Information Desk (MEID) was set up. This Intranet contains a number of different information sources. The most important are mentioned here (also see the figure):

• Absence list of the members of the TG
• Event calendar facility
• Schedule of experiment rooms
• On-line Guide of the Technical Group
• Telephone and Room List

The MEID is very well accepted by the users and is a great success. This can best be demonstrated by the number of accesses per day to the MEID system (around 600 per day!). The fact that the on-line TG-Guide replaced an old paper version was appreciated. The users now has access to up-to-date information from his or her desk. It was a major task to create this on-line guide and it needs some attention every year to keep the information up-to-date.

Some of the information offered in MEID is based on html-file and others become available by executing CGI-scripts or programs. Some of the information is stored in a relational database, such as the absence list of the TG members or the calendar of events. (See the following figures to get an idea about the information stored and the type of user interface.) Users find it extremely simple and convenient to use these frontends. From system the designers point of view it turned out to be very positive to use a relational database to maintain this type of structured information.

The absence list gives an overview about absence times of technical specialists which is of importance for the users. It has convenient search and input interfaces. See an example in the following figure.

Click on the images for full size view.

Similarly, the calendar facility turned out to be very productive and directly replaced the old paper version. It was rapidly taken into use by everyone. See an output in the following figure. Public events of the calendar entries are automatically put in the public  calendar that can be viewed via Internet.

In the following figure a typical input screen is presented. The simplicity of the user interface also convinced the secretaries that this system should be used.

Last updated: February 14, 2000 12:55

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