BizCard Search

Everybody knows that when your browser opens, it opens to a default page. In many cases, this page is http://www.msn.com, since this is what Microsoft has been using as the default start page for their Internet Explorer browser for years. MSN is a nice resource for the latest news, but does it really meet your requirements? Some people change it to other websites such as a corporate website, news sites such as CNN or search engines such as Google. Once again, the question is if this is the best solution for your personal situation.

Your personal start page should act as a dashboard, a standardized starting point where your online life begins.

With the right start page, you will have access to all the 'stuff' you need at one centralized location: News items, search functionality, maybe even small reports that show you essential information about your company!

Does this make sense? I hope so. To illustrate the point, imagine the following scenario:

You are the CEO of a mid-sized company with multiple locations. When you start your day, you open your email to check if there are any messages that need your attention. After taking care of your email, you open your browser and start reading the news, most likely on various different sites to satisfy your hunger for world news, branch news and specialized news. After browsing through the headlines on every site and reading the articles that peak your interest, you move on and check the status of the company by running some reports in your accounting or operational software.

Now, imagine having all the information you need on one, single page that shows up every time you open your web browser! In one overview, you see the latest headlines from your favorite news sites, you see how many new email messages are waiting in your account – maybe even with senders and subjects – and a report is automatically generated that shows you the KPI's (Key Performance indicators – I'll get back to that later on) for all of your offices in real time! All the information to start your day on one page.

For many people, this scenario is a dream of the future. For some however, it is a reality.

The scenario above uses different technologies to give you the desired result. One of these technologies is RSS feeds, used for displaying news headers, which I will discuss in the next section. An other one, used to display the custom reports, can be done by your IT staff with the use of a reporting tool such as the commercial Crystal Reports, the Open Source DataVision, or even Microsoft Office, where you can use Word or Excel to create reports in HTML format.

If you schedule these reports to be ran automatically every-so-often, reporting only non-itemized, condensed data such as descriptions with totals, you will notice immediately if something is off-key and you can take action immediately. You will no longer have to manually log on to your applications, run the reports and search your way through the final numbers, you now have the overview on a web page, every time you open your browser....