The Technology of Tracking Human Disease

Attending this conference? Be sure to catch RayJordan from our partners D2i Solutions, who will be demonstrating how Toucan Navigate 2007 and Groove can be used together to track disease outbreaks, assess at-risk populations and manage an effective response.

Linking Toucan Navigate and Zoho Creator

I have been reviewing Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com) recently and decided to create a quick prototype to illustrate how it could be used with our Toucan mapping tool to do something useful.

Here's a simple scenario taken from my college studies in Urban Planning - looking at the relationship between the location of Fast Food Franchises and major highways. My main objective was to accomplish this without a single line of code (no html, no javascript, no nothing) and yet provide enough functionality to answer some basic questions, hence making this potentially useful in the business world.

Specifically, I wanted to:

1. Have more than one person enter,update or view Franchise data (i.e. collaborate)
   
2. Dynamically filter the data (by Franchise or by State).
3. Display thousands of records on a map.

In less than ten minutes I assembled this (I did have the data). The form below is used to capture data.

The ZC View is used to filter the data by Franchise or by State and to save the Filtered or all the (aprox. 20,000 records) and save them as .csv file (needed by Toucan Navigate).

Toucan Navigate is used to display all or a partial list (i.e. filtered) of the records stored and maintained in ZC.

So here it is - a map clearly showing the concentration of Fast Food Places along the I-95 corridor.

You can check the ZC app here: Fast Food Tracker

And download a trial (full feature) version of Toucan Navigate.

Bambuco Desktop gains Microsoft Certification

late last year, we submitted Bambuco for testing, and I'm pleased to report that

"Bambuco Desktop has been tested and meets the criteria for the Microsoft “Platform Test for ISV Solutions” program:  Windows Client, SQL Server 2005, Managed Code and Web Services + .NET Framework."

In plain speaking, this means Bambuco has passed tests for connecting and working with SQL Server and web services. There was no test relevant for the Groove-specific aspect, otherwise we'd have submitted it for that. The core code that makes up 90% of Bambuco is shared with our other products, which is a nice confidence booster.

"Testing was conducted independently by VeriTest, a testing service of Lionbridge Technologies."

Mark recognized for his contributions to the Groove community

Today we've found out that Mark Smith, one of the founders of Information Patterns has been awarded with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award. For more than five years Mark has devoted his talents to enhancing Groove and to helping others who are using Groove. The products that Mark has developed have been very useful to many entities around the world - in many cases for emergency response or disaster relief .
CONGRATULATIONS to Mark!

Partner news

Congratulations to Asher at our partners Tech-Pro, who has made his first sale of Toucan Navigate 2007 to a customer in India!

Also congratulations to Jean-Michel Davault at Hommes et Process and Clive Davies at D2i - both have passed the new Microsoft Office Groove 2007 certification exam. If you're looking for a partner to help with implementing Groove, then you should consider J-M and Clive to be your "go to" guys, if you're in the UK or France.

Toucan Reporter updated

I've just uploaded a new release of Toucan Reporter 2007. This release, 2.0.11  features new icons for the application and the report files well as fixes for a couple of bugs.

Extracting Groove Forms attachments with Bambuco

Working with files in Groove seems to be a theme, this month. We're just finishing off a project for a customer who has lots of forms records with lots of attachments. This is affecting forms performance, as well as being unwieldy, so we're moving the attachments out of the forms tool and info a files tool. This makes them amenable to searching with our recent free Tocuan FileFinder application.

Here's the script that extracts the files from the forms tool, written in the Boo programming language:

/*
Class: ExportAttachments
Exports the attachments from a forms tool
*/

class ExportAttachments (GrooveScript):
    def Main():
        try:
            space = Groove.GetSpace("DMS2")
            formsTool = space.GetFormsTool("Billing")
            data = formsTool.GetData("All Records", "", true)
            table = data.Tables[0]
            for row in table.Rows:
                cust = row["CustomerName"]
                purchaseOrder = row["PONum"]
                rec = GetFormsRecord(row)
                print "${cust}/${purchaseOrder}"
                for attachment in rec.Attachments:
                    attachment.SaveToFolder("C:\\temp\\${space.Name}\\${cust}\\${purchaseOrder}");
        except e:
            ReportError(e) 

I'm pretty happy with this - it expresses my needs clearly with (almost) a minimum of overheads. I particularly like the the SaveToFolder call which constructs the folder path using the variables declared earlier on. The only ugliness is getting the data with GetData, and then getting the zeroth table from Groove in two lines rather than one.

What about error checking you may ask? Well, it is included - at two levels. First, if there was any of the usual problems (space or tool not existing for example), you would see a warning message. GetSpace, for example, will post a warning message if the space does not exist. If something unusual happens, the ReportError script function will give you a detailed report.

Of course, I'm only going to take a part of the credit - the code responsible for integrating with Groove. The clarity of programming in Boo is down to Rodrigo B. de Oliveira and numerous supporting developers.

If you want to have a play with Bambuco - go right ahead and download it here.