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I have worked on the NMSU Phonebook. The Phonebook has three sections to it, and each section offers something that I have yet to see at any other university.

First is the person lookup page. Clicking on the A (which is all last names beginning with A) brings up a list of people. First, this offers the ability to use it as a directory, just like any phonebook. You can do searches as well. The information is presented in a pleasant manner with nice colors and in a zebra table so the names are easily distinguished from one another. But the one unique feature that I have not seen at other universities is the Rolodex. You can at a glance see the person's name, email address (if on campus, otherwise an email form), and their phone number. Now, with most traditional phonebooks you click on the person's name which takes you to a new page to learn more information about that person. That's so 1995. With the help of Rico we can accomplish this in a much nicer way without displaying a whole new page. Click on a person's name and it unfolds to show more information, including work and/or personal information. It looks like a business card. Now, how do we get this information into Outlook or other email program. The old way is typing in the details to save a new contact, the new way is by clicking on the icon to download the person's vCard. Now the information is automagically added to your email program.

The second section is the department lookup list. This is where we use AJAX. You can do a search for the departments in a traditional way, but doing an AJAX call is so much faster. It might be a little overkill, but the speed is just awesome. It also includes links to an Google Maps implementation of campus that I and my co-workers worked on (future post).

Finally, we have the hierarchy page. I have not even seen this page at any other university. I think it is totally cool. It is basically a hierarchy of departments. So you know who is on the food chain.

Of course all of these link together. Click on a person in the hierarchy and it takes you to the person lookup. Click on a department on the person lookup or department lookup page and it takes you to that department in the hierarchy. In my opinion, very cool.