Active Directory and DNN

I have another project in the works right now at Memorial, We have to create a form for our Department heads to fill out what application access their new employees will need. When the form is complete they will submit and It will get emailed to us in MIS. The trick is, I need the form to have the AD username attached to the form so we know who it is coming from as a “safety”. So I worked on binding and getting DNN to work with AD today. It was quite fun… broke DNN then fixed it, then broke it again, and again, and fixed it again. So now it works and now I need to test it tomorrow. Wish me luck !

More website work !

So after having so much fun, and so much pride in working with Derrick on his site. I am happy to report I have 2 maybe 3 more website projects I am doing for some people in the near future. I am really excited to see what they will be looking to do and see if I can test more of my skills and see if new challenges arise.

Another form created and testing.

Today I finished the 2nd form for caregivers at Memorial to either update their information or if they are new to the hospital to enter their information. it is now live and working well. I am especially proud of the electronic form it generates and sends an email to the user.

After I was finished with and was about to sit back in my chair with a sigh of relief, I got another email saying “I got another idea for a form” SO, I now am working on a Medical records change form, in case of a nurse or caregiver enters a name,SSN, etc. in wrong. It generates a form and is sent to our health information services dept head. Its pretty nifty and is the one I am most proud of at the moment since I finished building it a few hours ago and I am already testing to make sure its collecting the data correctly and is generating the right fields for the form to email the Health Services dept.

Modifications complete…..

So I spent the day working at home and made the modifications that were requested by the COO. Added 5 new fields to the form. It took a while because the one field had 25 entries in it for all the departments at the Hospital. The others were pretty easy. We already at 387 people (when I started to modify the form at 1pm) Those people are lucky and don’t have to re-submit the form. The rest of the 613 people now have to submit a longer form with more info because of the issue we had with users not wanting to submit their last 4 digits of their SSN. Its as perfect as it can get until we get the next set of corrections….. Lets hope not.

Modifications…

200 of 100 staff members have already filled out their information on the Disaster information form with 100% sucess however, 30% complaining. When the form was first created we discussed if have the last four # of someones SSN would be appropriate. Since it wasn’t leaving our servers internally and only accessed by a few of us in the MIS department we came to the conclusion that it be fine since we needed it as a variable for checking with the user information in the payroll database.

There have been a few complaints about that and my director is trying to figure out the best solution. Employee ID is not a solution because..no one really knows if off hand without looking at a pay stub. We also thought the first 4 digits of our ID badges could work, until we realized none of us in the MIS department could read the numbers without taking a guess to what some of the digits are since the digits are printed on top of our barcodes…… So I believe the solution is gonna be adding two more fields( education and degree) to the form that can cross check or just export directly and sent to AlertNow. the 200 people that have already entered the information we can just check and export with no big deal. Were just trying to cut down on the problems of people not wanting to fill in their SSN, which I can understand.

DotNetNukes Usefulness

So its been only 3 shifts since we had the Disaster information page live on the new DNN site at the hospital and DNN is apparently showing its usefulness, more than I thought it would. I got out of a meetin earlier this morning on another form that I need to build for the Health Information Services Dept.

Currently they are using a word file that the user has to print out and fax. The form I am building will allow them to fill it out and email a  verification to the staff member who keeps records of new additions as well as updated information for our physicians. This form is gonna be a bit more complex to finish but I am looking forward to it.

It it exciting to see that more and more staff memebers are seeing what DNN can do and are coming up with ideas how to save time and resources.

It’s Live ! Learning new things everyday.

So driving into work this morning, It kinda hit me that in the DotNetNuke portal itself I may have needed to change the portal alias. Sure enough I get to work quickly figure out what I may need to change it to, and it was almost like magic where it starting working. After putting the IP address of the server as the portal alias it worked. I had it entered inncorrectly.

DotNetNuke it to hell…….

So, let me begin by saying that no the site is still not live yet to the network. It works great on the locally on the server and IIS is configured correctly and I can navigate to the site however, it just comes back saying “cannot connect to server” well by the end of today, NO one can tell me why this is happening, not my co-workers or even my former co workers from Hempfield. So I am actually at a loss and not sure what to look at to try to fix it to get this ready. It is somehow not seeing 4 files that it needs to launch the actual site. They are there in the folder where they should be and yet, NOTHING happens when I navigate to the site. Today is a perfect example of why I am switching my major to something else.

Update on DotNetNuke project

I spend all my time at work today fine tuning the DotNetNuke site at the hospital today. The custom form module I installed is working rather well. The day was spend modifying the questions and text fields to pull the correct data into the SQL database. Not only that, I also needed to find out what format I needed the phone #’s to be in so we can check it with the payroll database.

Around 1:00pm we gave a demo to the hospitals COO. He gave it the thumbs up after a few minor tweaks. So we were good to go on.

By the end of the day everything is complete and  was asked to add “help” buttons to give examples of what to enter into the field “7175559876″ for phone #’s and “name@mhyork.org” for e-mail addresses. So tomorrow I’ll finish that up then we can publish the site to the rest of the internal network and we can start the process of collecting the data.

I only realized today that we are going through this whole process because we need accurate and correct data to hand over to the AlertNow people. When I was still at Hempfield, Mike Graham and Jeff Swarr had implemented the AlertNow system. It basically is a rapid communications systems used in need of emergencies or other important informational messages that you would need to get out to your staff and/or community  Via: phone call, text message, or e-mail.

The project should be completed this week and we should have all the data collected by the end of next week. Here is hoping…..

DotNetNuke at Memorial

After being impressed working with DotNetNuke at Hempfield on their new website before I left. I have decided that bringing it to Memorial Hospital would be a project that would get the thumbs up.

I was given a project to somehow collect all the contact information (e-mails, home/cell phones) of our hospital physicians, administrators and staff to cross check with our payroll database. The idea is for us to get the correct information to create an “alert now” type of directive that will allow us to get information or a message to the staff in need of an emergency.

Originally I was asked to learn Visual Basic and write a windows application that would basically be a “contact form”. After spending about 4 days learning about SQL databases and learning a bit of Visual Basic I started building. The database part was easy enough in SQL but the windows application was a bit tricky for me since I was trying to get the “submit” button to actually insert the data that was filled in each text field into the SQL database. I was so close and I know its a few minor modifications away from actually working however, I was on a tight timeline.

I finally spent an evening thinking about other ways this could be done and it finally hit me…. I knew that DotNetNuke already had a “registration form” that would you could fill out and submit data into a SQL database so I did some researching and I found a custom module that allowed me to make a custom for of my choosing and link it to a table in the database.

So with that I got permission to try DotNetNuke before we contracted this project out to someone outside of the hospital.  It took a few tries to get it installed due to some hardware and software issues but then finally, third times a charm and I got it installed on the third server I tried. (with Mike Grahams help of course).

Once it was installed and the portal was running it was about another hour until I got the form module installed and had the custom form built. It wasn’t perfect yet it was usable and I  got the “looks good” from the boss.

This weekend I found a DNN skin that would fit well to the hospital (color,theme,layout) with some slight adjusting the skin fits well to the website that the hospital already has.

Hopefully I can get the hospital to use DNN for more than just gathering staff contact information. Maybe i’ll wait to see how well this will work and how well this is gonna be received before I mention that we can use this to replace the intranet we already have.