Upcoming Feature - Widgets

[Amol B]

The first time I heard the term "Widgets" - it sounded curious and fun and I couldn't wait to know more about it. Over the past few years Widgets have become increasingly popular and most of us have probably used Widgets directly or indirectly.

The iCarpool-RideshareOnline platform will be including Widgets capability - with some widgets coming soon. Notably, the Widgets coming soon are:
- Emission Savings Widget
- Vanpool Seat Finder Widget

For example, let's say a city jurisdiction Jacksonville has a website www.cityofjacksonville.gov and this website hosts information for an incentive program that is being run based off the trip calendar. To showcase achievements in terms of emission savings, monetary savings, trips reduced, etc. on the site, the network administrator could make use of Widgets.
1. The administrator would login to the administration application and generate the Widget code. The external site that would host the Widget needs to be specified. For example, cityofjacksonville.gov. The Widget is specific to a domain.
2. The administrator can copy the generated code and paste it in the appropriate web page that resides in the www.cityofjacksonville.gov site.

That's it - from now on, when users visit the site www.cityofjacksonville.gov, they will see automatically updated program statistics for that network.

In terms of generating the code and deploying, the Vanpool Seat Finder Widget is similar. The usage may vary.
Example – Many vanpool agencies generate monthly vanpool lists and place them on their website. The agency could consider replacing that process by instead placing the Widget on the website. When deploying, the agency could choose to (a) only show vanpools that are run by the agency OR (b) show all vanpools including those from partner agencies. The Widget will always generate most recent “live” data from the system, so there’s no need to keep updating. There are other advantages such as new vanpools starting will show on the list immediately.
Widgets are powerful and can open up new scenarios.
Example - A city jurisdiction that has online resources for vanpool could now place the Widget directly on its website. Now users can not just read about vanpools on the city's site but also find vanpools "live" from the system, get contact information and take the next step. In this case, the Widget can be deployed to display all vanpools from all vanpool agencies. Let's think about what happens without the widget. Without the Widget, the city has limited options:

• host multiple vanpool lists, one for each agency. The searching user would then have a challenging experience trying to find vanpools from among multiple documents.
• host multiple links to vanpool sites for different agencies. The searching user would have a challenging experience to navigate to different sites and find vanpools from these various sources.

For those interested in knowing more about Widgets, I found an interesting article : http://webtrends.about.com/od/widgets/a/what_is_widget.htm.

I've also attached an image showing a sample of how a widget on an external site will look like.

[Julie Lloyd]

We've cleaned up the code on our end for the City,State and Zip text and fixed the Explorer problem, thanks Amol. The Vanpool Seat Finder is a very useful and convenient widget!! I highly recommend it to others. I do see an immediate problem and a potential future concern. We've changed a primary driver but it's not reflected when using the widget and it's possible that someone looking specifically for a vanpool may not even feel the need to register in RSO because the Vanpool Seat Finder is so quick, convenient and almost effortless. The limitations this poses aren't necessarily apparent to the end user. Just a thought.

[Amol B]

That's good news that the implementation is complete - I also appreciate the feedback.

One of the advantages of the widget is the data shown is up to date date from the system.

The widget shows the primary contact - so changes made to the primary contact are effective immediately. A change in primary driver does not automatically change the primary contact - the primary contact must be changed explicitly. Is it possible in your case - when you changed the primary driver - the primary contact also was not changed and hence shows the old data?