deep gray sea

michael micheletti

InstantService's in-house admin system user interface.

sites and systems: in-house admin

May 8, 2004 The in-house admin system runs behind the firewall at InstantService. The system is used by their support folks to create accounts, configure optional features, manage the chat servers and generally keep things running. This project was a teardown, where I replaced an existing system that had become outmoded and difficult to maintain. I got to do just about the whole thing on this one, it was fun. The system went into production use during 2002.

Login page

I did the graphics for the site, and there's definitely some sort of gear theme going on. Don't ask me why, I don't normally think of myself as a gear person. I had this bad moment in high school auto shop where I had a handful of needle bearings left over after rebuilding a transmission and asked my teacher what I should do with them. Wonder if that Chevy's still running? View larger image

Home page

Here's the home page. I used little photos as icons on the site. Hey, there's another gear. The site uses the same navigational framework as account admin, in fact in-house admin is implemented as a private brand with an extra security wrapper. The links without icons are to other stand-alone system management and tech support tools. View larger image

Account Search

The account search page is where you can track down an account by a unique ID or by the company name. Once you find the account, you can modify properties, like connection types, optional features and custom links. I had fun building the paging code used here. I wanted to use the original code for the system, since it looked really complex and intricate and I didn't want to have to redo it all. But I had such a hard time wading through the code that I decided to try doing it myself. Mine ended up really simple, just four little methods inside one servlet that took a day to write. I felt sort of bad about tossing out the original, since there was obviously a lot of work that went into making it, but then thought about having to maintain it forever and decided to keep the one that was easiest to fix. View larger image

Optional Features

The optional features screen is where special extra-cost features are turned on or off for an account. This was a new screen in the application; before these items were all jumbled in with other stuff. View larger image

Broadcast

The broadcast screen is used by system managers when they're doing maintenance on the system. They might need to take down a chat server for some reason; although they'll warn their customers well ahead of time, when the time comes they can broadcast a message to anyone still logged in. There are some complex selection possibilities available here; the idea is to be able to narrow down the user community that receives a broadcast message. View larger image

Chat Servers Portal

The chat servers portal is a bit unusual. It has links and short descriptions, like you'd expect from a portal page, but also displays chat server status right there on the first screen in the section. The system managers requested this; they wanted an indicator that told at a glance the state of the chat servers. The links in the chat server status box go to a properties screen where configuration values for an individual chat server can be set. View larger image

Account List

The account list is one of several chat server metrics screens. These modules display real-time data from a selected chat server. One of the other engineers wrote the metrics code, I came up with the UI wrapper for it. The chat server metrics can also be run independently of in-house admin. This particular screen shows accounts active on a selected chat server, other metrics display information about agents, customers, memory usage and other real-time values. View larger image

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