User Interface

We can now explain in greater detail how the generic aspects of a data management application are implemented in Aware IM. We will start with the User Interface.

Applications configured by Aware IM have HTML-based user interface that can be viewed by any web browser such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox. After a user logs into the system Aware IM displays the screen similar to the one shown below (this shows screen layout for the CRM application):

In Aware IM the screen is divided into several areas:

The optional area at the top is called the banner (not shown on the picture above)
The leftmost area if defined may contains the menu of the system (as on the picture above) or some other information
The optional toolbar area at the top of the screen may have an additional menu (as on the picture above)
The main central area is called the main page and it contains a number of panels showing data list and calendar (called content panels)
The optional area at the bottom is called the status bar

The banner area at the top of the screen usually contains the logo of the system and possibly some advertisements. The menu always contains the main operations that can be performed by the user. The main page is the working area of the screen that displays data forms, data search results etc. The status bar if present shows the name of the currently logged in user and the name of the business space. You can also allocate special areas to the left, right and underneath the main page, that usually contain static controls (like in the example above), news, advertisements etc.

Whether each of these areas (also called frames) will be shown as well as the contents of each area can be specified in the application configuration. The following section explains how this is done.