Welcome to Sybernet

Navigation is pretty much the same as you are already used to, but we've added a couple of new features to make your browsing a slightly more pleasant experience.

We've made it easier to search for employees. Every menu screen contains a "search engine" in the upper-left hand corner just for this purpose.

Ever forget where an application was and were too tired to hunt for it? You can now use the menu screen to search for it.

Are your applications scattered all over the place? Now you can designate "favorite" applications that always appear on the main menu screen.

Searching for employees

In the upper left hand corner of the menu page is a form field where you can enter an employee name or number. In fact you can search for several employees at once by separating each name or number with with the keyword or.

        Find Employee:
        

All of the fields displayed are searchable, by the way. Not only can you search for an employee name or number, you can also search on e-mail address, telephone number, room number, and department number.

If your search finds too many employees, the display stops after 60 or so, and you will need to refine your search.

As mentioned above, you can use the keyword or to search for more than one entry, or you may separate your target by the keyword and to refine your search selection. This is probably best illustrated by example.

A search for "smith" will return all employess who contain the word smith in any searchable field. This might be their first name, their last name, or their e-mail address. A search for "jim" would do like-wise, of course.

But we can combine the two by searching for "smith or jim" or "smith and jim." In the former case, all employees containing smith or jim are returned. In the latter case, only those employees that contain an entry for "jim" and "smith" are returned.

If you omit the keyword or or and, the search assumes you mean and. Thus, a search for "jim smith" means returns all employees that have an entry for "jim" and "smith." In most cases, this means you will find the entry for the employee "jim smith."

But we can expound on this and request a search for "jim smith or bob jones." This will return only those employees that contain a "jim" and a "smith" or those employees that contain a "bob" and a "jones" in their entry.

Finally, we can refine the search even further. Suppose we are looking for someone in the ITS deparment. We know they are located at the patio level (AH0) and we recall their name is either bob or jim. We can construct this query as follows:

    (jim or bob) and AH0

Searching for applications

You can now search for applications if you don't remember where they are. If you know anything about the application's name, description, or the author who wrote it, you can tell the menu to search for it.

        Search Word: 

Whenever you select a sub-menu from the list of menu names in the left margin, the list of applications in that folder is displayed in the middle of the screen and your favorite applications will disappear. To make your favorites appear again, scroll to the bottom and click the button called "Main Menu."

Picking Favorite Applications

Favorite applications are displayed on the main menu screen whenever you have selected any. So every time you log in or return to the main menu screen, your favorite applications are there waiting for you. No longer do you need to scroll down through all of the sub-menus looking for them.

Next to each application name and description is a checkbox labeled "Favorite." Simply check the box to make this application one of your favorites.

If in time you no longer consider this to be one of your favorites, simply uncheck the checkbox and it'll disappear the next time the menu is refreshed.

Maybe you don't have any favorite applications. That's okay too. This facility is optional, so you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

New Look And Feel

Some things haven't changed, but look as though they have. The bright-blue margin on the left is gone and has been replaced by colors that aren't so loud, but the same information is still there and works just like before.

The left margin contains links to other sub-menus; for example, when you select the link for Costpoint (SRI) or Costpoint (SRIC), all of items contained in that sub-menu will be displayed in the middle of the screen. Sub-menus can contain real applications or (more often than not) other sub-menus. You can distinguish sub-menus from applications because they appear in bold.

Security

Don't be alarmed if the examples shown here do not appear when you log into Sybernet. Only the applications and sub-menus that you actually have access to are displayed.

Drilling Down and Drilling Up

Drilling down is pretty straight-forward: find something you like and click the link once to drill down to that item. The menu will either change to reflect the contents of that sub-menu, or if this is a real application, that application will be invoked on this page.

Drilling up is a little more difficult. Fortunately, your browser and the Sybernet Menu Screen provide several ways to navigate your way out from whence you came.

Whenever you are in a sub-menu, you can return to the next higher level by clicking the link in the left margin (it will be near the top) that has the same name that is displayed for this sub-menu. The sub-menu name is always displayed in large type at the top of the screen.

If you're just looking for a quick way to start over, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the menubar item called "Main Menu."

Your browser also has two built-in functions that make drilling up easy to do. The most common of which (though the least useful) is the Back button. Clicking this once drills up to the previous page. The previous page, however, doesn't necessarily drill up, but instead displays the page that got you to where you are. Sometimes, depending on how you got where you are, you may have to click this button numerous times to actually get back to where you want to be.

The fastest and easiest method for drilling up is to use the Go menu item located on the menu bar of the current window or at the very top of your screen. The Go menu displays a history of all the pages you've visited since you began your travels. You'll see the title for each page (like Labor or Accounts Receivable). Simply mouse-down to the page to which you want to return and release.

Where Did My Applications Go?

If you've been idle for more than two hours, your connection will be terminated. This is quite subtle because nothing is going to indicate this until you try to do something while disconnected. One of two things are going to happen:

If you attempt to submit a form while disconnected, Sybernet will tell you that you are not connected. This one makes a lot of sense because it's telling you exactly what's wrong.

If you attempt to click a link while disconnected, Sybernet will detect that you are not connected and log you in as "anonymous" on our guest server. Sometimes you might even get the results you expected. Most of the time, however, the link doesn't exist and you instead get a very nasty message saying so.

This case is obviously the more subtle of the two, and I admit it takes practice on your part to figure out what happened. When you see something like

        Stored procedure 'sp_html_appdata' not found.
        Specify owner.objectname or use sp_help to check whether the object exists.

That's a pretty good indication that you have timed-out and need to log in again.

Why can't I print this document? Not New!

Normally, when you request a document from a web server, your browser saves a local copy of that document on your PC in memory or on disk in something called a cache. If this local copy is available (if it hasn't expired), then your browser will use that instead of requesting the same page from the server. That's why clicking the Back and Forward buttons respond so quickly.

When you connect with a certificate in Sybernet, the rules have changed. You are now connected to a secure web server in which the data is encrypted as it is transmitted to your browser so that nobody but you is able to read this information.

Netscape Communicator (your browser) goes one step further by refusing to cache these documents to disk. So when you try to print a document, Communicator looks for it in the cache, can't find it, and instead prints a message saying that the document does not exist. There is a solution! We can change your Netscape preferences file so that secured documents are cached just like regular documents.

From the Main Menu go to Sybernet Utilities and select the application called Cache. This application allows you to enable SSL caching so that printing secured documents is no longer a problem.

Final Notes

Yes, we've made some pretty dramatic changes. Anything new is going to take a few moments to get used to. Hopefully, the extra features we've added are going to make your "surfing" a bit more productive.