Why use Dynamic Menus?

Jim Cuoco,
CTO, Support Fusion, Inc.

When we first designed what is now Support Fusion's Help Desk solution back in 1999, we realized that businesses did not want to buy a cookie cutter solution. No business handles support the same as another or even uses the same terminology for their customer service processes. Dynamic Look and Feel was first and foremost the basis of our design.

One of the key features behind this philosophy is our navigation system. We wanted to make something that the user could manipulate. With a dynamic menu the user can add and remove features, change the order in which the features are shown, the way they are grouped, the language they are in, or the general terminology. Add the fact in that the system is completely web-based, the user can even add menu items that point to places outside the realm of our system. Dynamic menus give our users immense power of how they want their system to look and what functions they want their users to see.

We started out with a Javascript-based menu in 1999, in 2003 we added a pure HTML-based menu, and in 2005 added a Control-based menu. Each of these menu types has its pros and cons, but all three are available, letting our customer's decide what works best for them.

Another benefit of a dynamic menu system is that our customers can create menu items that point directly at items in the system that they would normally need to drill down to via other pages. For example, if there is a key attachment attached to an issue in the database, pointing a menu item right at that attachment's URL will bring it up immediately. The same goes for reports. Any report can be placed in a menu item rather than accessing a report list. Parameters can also be placed in the URL changing the Title of the report or you can pass information to modify the Where clause and change the enter result set.

Customers can also utilize the Message functionality in the system to generate their own secure web pages. The Message feature includes a rich-text editor so users who do not know HTML can create great looking pages. After a Message has been created, it can either be tied to a Profile, Company, or Individual and will appear in their general News page (news.aspx). But many more messages can be created and accessed directly from menu items, by specifying the news.aspx?name=xxx where xxx is the name that was given to that message. Each message also has a security level so users with lower security levels cannot access messages they are not meant to see.

In the end, the dynamic menu feature is one of the biggest differentiators between Support Fusion and its competition. Add in Profiles and the combination of Site Wrappers, Site Parameters, and many of the other features Support Fusion offers and our customers can create an endless set looks and functionality sets for one of our systems.


Jim Cuoco
Email: jcuoco@supportfusion.com
Comany: Support Fusion Inc.
Blog: From the Desks of Support Fusion