Making Things Better with idbsCreate

We recently shared news about our internal day devoted to employee innovation – idbsCreate. We’re lucky to be able to count on a global team of motivated and talented individuals from our software development divisions through to sales, human resources and marketing.

With idbsCreate, we encourage our people to share their ideas to make things better and give our employees the freedom to pitch ideas via video submissions; the only criteria being that their idea has to help ‘makes things better’, whether for the company, the environment or for the local community. People can then join the project teams and work on a prototype of their concept to pitch to the company – the winning idea is given time and resources to develop the project to completion.

In our last edition of idbsCreate, I jumped at the opportunity to change the evolutionary direction of the E-WorkBook configuration screen. Let’s spare a thought for the poor E-WorkBook administrator. As software grows and evolves, there’s always a certain amount of feature inflation as enhancements are added and improvements made, with each new enhancement adding configuration settings. Fantastic for customers but in the case of E-WorkBook, it’s resulted in a 28-tab configuration screen, far from ideal for administrators!

So what’s different about the new configuration screen?

• Goodbye tabs and hello alphabetic list of configuration options on the left of the screen
• Each individual configuration screen is now searchable

What other features were added?

• The configuration screen now remembers the configuration option you last selected, so when you close the screen and come back later it will open in the same configuration area as before
• It’s backwards compatible – if you don’t like the new screen layout you can stick with the old tabbed-layout. The screen switches between the two layouts and remembers your last selection

idbsCreate was a brilliant idea. The day of the 2014 awards, there was a real buzz in the office. Moreover, taking an outdated screen and revamping it into a modern, searchable, usable screen was very satisfying. I can’t wait for the next day of creating!

Look out for the configuration screen update later in the year in a forthcoming E-WorkBook release.