Visual Scheduling Blog

First of all, I have to clarify that this blog post is not(!) about progress bars as we all know well from installing software or from downloading files. But this post is about the visualization of progress as we are used to see for instance in production planning or project management software systems.

I want to demonstrate the difference between a "classic" progress bar and a forecast oriented visualizaton of progress. The second is a new approach that has been currently implemented in our latest Gantt chart application we developed with our NETRONIC Web Application Framework and the feedback from the users was enthusiastic.

No need to spend much words on stating the obvious: the way of how enterprise software applications are built is changing quickly, and HTML5/ JavaScript have become state-of-art in a cloud- and mobile-driven world. For us as company with decades of experience and tradition in developing Java, ActiveX and .NET Gantt chart controls, this market disruption created a bit of a challenge. However, changes bring always chances and hence we took the challenge … and re-invented our way of building interactive Gantt chart. The purpose of this blog post is to share with you where we are with providing you with HTML5 Gantt chart capabilities. I also want to highlight how you can benefit from our new HTML5 Gantt visualization technology – independent if you are software developer looking for a control or an end user looking for a visual scheduling application.

It's been quite a while now since I submitted a report about the progress in developing the Visual Production Scheduler JavaScript Add-in. Due to the huge extensions and modifications it took us a little longer than was originally planned. But now the time has come to share our latest developments with you. Version 1.4 of the Visual Production Scheduler JavaScript Add-in, that can be used in the Dynamics NAV Web Client as well as the Tablet and Windows Client, is ready for use and available for our partners and customers.

Last year, I published a series of blog posts sharing our lessons learned when developing business-savvy JavaScript add-ins for Dynamics NAV. With this series, I aimed at giving developers some best practices that we gained when creating our Visual Production Scheduler as fully-integrated JavaScript add-in for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. One of these posts dealt with the issues that you face when trying to resize JavaScript add-ins in the Dynamic NAV web client at runtime. Well, times change and so does Dynamics NAV. With the recent release of NAV 2016, things have changed a little bit and hence here is an update of this tip.

The modern look & feel of Gantt charts not only helps gaining user acceptance. A well-thought-out design also yields intuitiveness and user friendliness. So, when developing a Gantt chart one should not only keep an eye on functionality but on design as well.

Of course, every Gantt chart has to meet its own planning requirements and hence has to have its own look. Even though, there are some basic design considerations a developer should keep in mind when developing a Gantt chart.

The modern look & feel of Gantt charts not only helps gaining user acceptance. A well-thought-out design also yields intuitiveness and user friendliness. So, when developing a Gantt chart one should not only keep an eye on functionality but on design as well.

Of course, every Gantt chart has to meet its own planning requirements and hence has to have its own look. Even though, there are some basic design considerations a developer should keep in mind when developing a Gantt chart.

The second part of our blog series about the best design for user-friendly Gantt charts introduces three more tips for creating modern charts. The first three tips described in the last blog were about bar appearance. The next three tips deal with the complete graphic area, including time scale, table and Gantt graph.

When developing a Gantt chart, a key concern always is to provide all needed drag & drop scheduling functionality, of course. However, a proper UI design also matters since it not only underlines the chart's functions but is also essential for a good user acceptance and vital for user-friendliness.

In this series of blog posts with Gantt chart tips we discuss 9 design tips for user-friendly Gantt charts that aim at supporting the development of modern, visually appealing and meaningful Gantt charts. The first part of this series will give you some valuable tips on bar design.

Some months ago I supplied you with a blog series summarizing our experiences with developing a JavaScript/ HTML5 "viewer" for NETRONIC’s Visual Production Scheduler. Based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV add-in technology we built a JavaScript Gantt chart add-in, which can be used with the Windows Client as well as with the Web Client of Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 and 2015. Although we were quite happy that we were able to offer such a Gantt chart very shortly after the launch of the JavaScript control add-in technology in Dynamics NAV, we did not lean back. Instead, we reworked the architecture of our JavaScript control add-in to further optimize the performance (especially in a browser-based environment) and to enable also some new functionalities. With this blog post, we again share the lessons learned.