UI for Gauss by W P Fritz

Gauss
now OpenText
formerly Magellan

	Summary
	Research and Development Department Irvine, CA

Gauss, now OpenText, is a document management company. Their scanning software was incorporated into a kiosk presentation which allowed the users at kiosk touchscreen workstations to photocopy and transfer documents using the internet. The 500 kiosks were distributed in truckstops by another company, DriverNet.com. The Gauss ScanNet software identified the user and provided menus for the user to categorize and scan a number of documents at one session. At the end of the session, the documents were uploaded, emailed and/or FTP'd to the central host, and then distributed appropriately. The plan was to sponsor the installations through trucking companies, which provide their drivers with documentation and authorities to perform that transfer.

I created a user interface that allowed each trucking company to customize the presentation to suit their specific needs. These "presentations" could be downloaded to the kiosk when the trucker was identified. In the user interface, a treeview structure (above) identified each screen and their components. Labels, Buttons, Text input boxes and list boxes were individual components which comprised a screen. To coordinate with the distributed presentations, rigid pre-existing criteria could be embellished to create a unique presentation for each trucking company. The back end interfaced with the foundational Gauss document processing package.

I used MS Visual Basic (VB5) to create and manipulate screen objects through the Win32 API. That code was used by the trucking companies to create their presentations. At the kiosks, the VB-generated files containing the UI information was read by the presentation software written using Borland C/C++ version 6.0. Borland's OWL (Object Windows Library, similar to MS MFC) was also used to step through the UI screens. I wrote this C code to coordinate the Gauss functionality (including the scanning and approval process) while providing the ability to present the customized screens with new methods.

The WYSIWYG / drag-and-drop User Interface (UI)

DriverNet

These modifications required approximately two months. They were performed from December 2000 to February 2001 on site in Irvine, California. Five hundred Kiosks were distributed to truckstops.