A sample space for tracking skills of members of an organization.

Documentation for
Learning Center
Contents

Delegate Space

The training center space needs to access information from the address book space. Therefore we add the address book space as delegate space.

Information Design

For tracking trainings and certification for people of an organization we assume, that new roles and new training courses are added less likely than people mastering exams. Therefore is should be easy and fast to add another certificate.

Based on Generic Doctype

Currently there is no doctype add-on that provides blueprints for training courses, certifications, or skills. Therefore we use - for this show case - the Generic doctype. The first thing is to set the Doctype property from 'generic' to the specific doctype.

Learning Course

Training Courses lists the training courses that are relevant for the show case organization.

The courses could themselves link to skills they provide for the attendees. For this show case we simply lists skills (if any) as bullet lists.

Roles

Roles define the training paths that are available for people in given roles. Since we do want to show new courses automatically on the role's page, there is a Display Table Macro to collect them. A new course specifies the roles it appeals to. This way there is no need to open another document when a new learning course is added.

We decide that the roles typically match the roles defines in the address book of an organization. Therefore we choose to employ delegate documents. An alternative approach would be to move roles from the address book into a separate space or to add the certification documents to the address book.

Stakeholders

In the context of the training center the members of this organization are considered stakeholders. The personal information is derived from the addressbook space by the use of a document property:

The roles relevant to the training center context need to be added to instances of the stakeholder document.

For stakeholders relevant courses not yet taken are also shown. This is accomplished using a set operation on tables (see Table Set Macro for details).

Certificates

A certificate is an association document. The association doctype automatically adds the parent's page title to its title to make the title unique (or more likely to be unique) within the space.

Due to a configuration of the layout in our site, the name of the document (which does not obey a uniqueness constraint) is shown instead of the title.

When a stakeholder masters an exam, the certificate information is added as a new document to the stakeholder document.

The certifications sections lists all certificates directly attached to the stakeholder document.

The association doctype specifies the associated document with the Document property. We choose to map this property to a new property called Training:

For certificates we again choose delegate documents to import relevant information from the training course.

Therefore the description of the course is rendered as the description of the certificate (the box around is only visible to users with edit permissions).

Unfortunately this is a manual step that may be overlooked when creating this document. Using a blueprint with a wizard would support users to add certificates with a link to the training course.

We added some properties to the certificate document:

To have a list of all certificates, we updates the Association Index to the Certificate Index.

Find Answers to your Questions

The information provided in the Learning Center space allows to find answers to the following questions.

Which Training Courses are available?

Click on Training Courses.

Which Certificates are owned by Employees of this Company?

Click on Certificate Index.

Although this list would likely get out of hand for larger companies, since this list shows every certificate.

The stakeholder overview may also provide this information.

For a large number of employees this again may get unwieldy. A solution could be to provide individual Space Index pages for different groups of stakeholders.

Which Certificates does an Employee own?

This information can be found on the stakeholder's page.

Click Stakeholders for the list of stakeholders and then select the employee you need the information for (e.g. Ada Larissa Lovelace).

Which Certificates are relevant for an Employee?

It depends on the stakeholder's roles.

To find a role either go to Roles and select the role ...

... or select the role on a stakeholder's page.

Which Employees have a given Role?

Go to the role you are interested in (e.g. Software Developer). The information is found in the stakeholder's section.

For each table row the Roles column shows all roles of the stakeholder.

Which Courses are relevant for the Stakeholder and not yet attended?

The stakeholder page lists the the certificates earned by the stakeholder as well as training coursed relevant according to the stakeholder's roles.

Once Larissa gets excited on marketing stuff and there is assigned the role of a marketeer in addition to her current software developer role, then the new training courses are shown as relevant on her page.

Now we add a new column to show the training path the training belongs to.

The Table Merger Macro allows to merge both tables into one.

So instead of information in two tables:

the information is rendered in one table:

Summary

This show case provides some insight into the mechanics of tools from the projectdoc Toolbox. While many things can be accomplished without blueprints and blueprint wizards, employing blueprints makes everything clearly easier to use.

Especially adding certificates could be done much nicer. Without a blueprint copying a page, finding and changing the specific parts is error prone and cumbersome.

More convenience can be achieved by adding a Create from Template Macro on the stakeholder's page. This would start the certificate wizard that collects all relevant information and renders the certificate immediately after saving (without going to the editor).