(Note: The desired product as described below doesn't need to be
specific to technology information; it could have been created for the
fashion industry, for all I care. Just so long as the data can be
changed.)
Background: My team at work handles pretty much everything that
affects the internal corporate desktop environment. This includes
client hardware, operating systems, software, etc. I've inherited an
Excel-based "roadmap" document that someone came up with a while back.
It shows what is currently in place, along with what we expect to be
coming down the road. (Specific products are "linked" to full
documentation.) A spreadsheet probably seemed like a good idea at the
time, and might have even been farily effective for a little bit of
data, but it's a complete mess now.
Here is a massively simplified example of what it looks like:
Fiscal 2005 Fiscal 2006 Fiscal 2007
Hardware Dell X Dell Y Dell Z
Desktop O/S Win 2K Win XP Vista
Software Office 2000 Office 2003 Office 2007
(There are lots more categories and sub-categories in the real thing.)
I'm looking for something to replace it, and have been focusing on
web-based options -- Flash and Java, mostly -- for accessibility and
flexibility reasons.
It would be nice to have something that defaults to a pretty
high-level view, with very little detail. What I'm envisioning is that
you could click on any particular aspect and get more specific
information about said aspect.
Ideally, the thing you click on would enlarge to show more detail, and
the everything else would shrink but still stay visible and remain
accessible. Even better, if you clicked on a heading to an individual
row or column, that entire row or column would behave in the same way.
I've looked and looked, but haven't been able to find any kind of
off-the-shelf kind of solution. I'm almost to the point of learning
Flash to get this done, but I'd rather save the time if someone has
already done the work. Not even sure if Flash is the best solution
for this, to be honest, but it seems like a decent fit.
Thanks in advance! |