March, 27, 2007 archives

mysql doesn’t have quite the number of fancy internal applications that you might suspect, and i got frustrated when the company started to roll out a system of monthly time-off reports based on emailing around an excel spreadsheet. (to add icing to that cake, they kept sending out the excel sheet with password protection!)

last friday, i spent an afternoon cooking up this little proof-of-concept application that tracked the same information as the spreadsheet, but in tasty web format, with some ajax goodness (courtesy of prototype).

as it turns out, there was an official company tool for doing this that was in the works, but they hadn’t bothered to let anyone know it was imminent. i’m told it is sox-compliant and configurable six ways to sunday. i haven’t seen it yet.

so my meager efforts did not go to waste, i just spent another half hour to make this a standalone demo (rather than tying into our internal personnel database). perhaps someone else can find some use for it, or take some inspiration from it.

here’s the simple workflow for the application:

1. employee clicks on days they took off in a month.
2. employee clicks button to get month approved, which sends email to boss.
3. boss reads email and follows link to view the report online.
4. boss clicks the button to approve the report, which sends mail to the employee and the finance department.
5. the finance department does whatever it does with the data. the employee can no longer change it.

obviously that’s not quite all you would want for a fully-functional application, but it is most of the way there. i think it’s already better than the system that involved emailing an excel spreadsheet around.