September 12, 2007

Recently, one of our clients asked us how to shorten event email alerts for display on their administrators’ handheld devices. Since most of their administrators are spending less time at their desks and more time in the field, it made more sense for the alerts to be customized for reading from these devices. I walked them through the process of editing the XML files in the Longitude installation directory for this specific use. But customers can also easily edit the text of alerts by using Longitude’s correlated events function and creating an event with their own text without having to do any coding.

This got me thinking about how well-suited the User Interface is to all kinds of changes in the workforce. More employees are checking email from a BlackBerry® and other handheld devices, and more and more companies allow their employees to work from home to allow for flexibility with hours, commuting and family needs. The User Interface in Longitude – which requires no ActiveX controls, plug-ins or applets – is perfectly suited for these types of flexible work environments because it allows clients to securely login to Longitude from anywhere a user has Internet access, including from home or even at an Internet café.

Many workplaces are adaptable to their workers’ schedules and it’s important that monitoring software be just as adaptable. Take this scenario: You’re on your way home from work and just as you’re pulling into your driveway your handheld beeps and displays an alert that something is wrong on your company’s network. No need to go all the way back to work to fix the problem, you can simply login to the Longitude User Interface from your home computer and proceed as you would from the office. And you’re doing all this all without having to write any code.

Posted by: Greg Savas, Technical Support Consultant