New Exciting DWF Usage for Facilities

22 December 2003

New Exciting DWF Usage for Facilities

I have seen some very clever usage of DWF files on a corporate network. You can show employee locations, printers and in many cases even install and map to the printers of an office as shown in Jimmy Bergmark’s intranet site.

I am showing a couple examples below.

Autodesk Facilities and Human Resources uses embedded DWF files to show the current office locations and associated information. Of course I have not made the clearest screen capture (below) on purpose due to the content such as office numbers in Autodesk facilities.

An employee goes to the corporate intranet site and then types in a search for an employee based on many different criteria just like a search engine. They then get the page with all the employee info and a link to their office shown in a daily updated database created DWF file. The web page has an embedded DWF showing the employee office and all current details at the top of the DWF window. It is originally zoomed in on the office but I grabbed the screen capture when zoomed out. Also the employee and office numbers have hyperlinks back to the intranet site so you know the phone number of the office in a reverse search.

Jimmy Bergmark’s excellent example of using a DWF in his facility in Sweden.
Jimmy uses the embedded DWF in his intranet to display many different office floor layouts. He says they do this because it allows employees at his company to easily connect printers since they move around quite a lot. In the floor plan layouts are all of their corporate networked printers and their mapped locations. Simply clicking on the hyperlinked printer device and you are all ready to print to the device just as you would by manually going through the network setup of a printer but this offers the visual and automated steps and it is so easy to do. Have you ever mapped to the wrong printer when searching through the network for the cryptically named device .

Some screen images of his DWF.