Work Clock Plus

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As many companies are searching for a solution to monitor and evaluate employee’s work, we at Mazarin took on the task of developing a custom web based solution to cater to our needs. WorkClockPlus (WCP) is an extension of the previously in-house developed Work Clock application used for time recording. A few basic HRIS features that go hand-in-hand with time recording have been plugged in to WorkClockPlus, adding to the business value of this tailor made application.

From a technology point of view, WCP was developed with Java, JDK 1.7 to be exact. Spring 3.1.0RC2 was used as the MVC web application framework. The ORM framework that was used in conjunction with a MySQL database was Hibernate 3.3.2GA. Richfaces 4.1.0, an open source Ajax-enabled component library for JavaServer Faces, hosted by JBoss brought the user interfaces to life. The application was built using Maven 3. Few other libraries such as quarts (to run scheduled tasks), joda-time (a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes), iText (for creating PDF documents), Apache POI (API for manipulating various file formats based upon the Office Open XML standards (OOXML)), Microsoft’s OLE 2 Compound Document format (OLE2) and freemarker templates (email templating) came in handy when developing the application. These technologies were chosen, partly because they were the latest versions of libraries and frameworks used at the time, and partly to try out Richfaces, which was completely new to the project team. WCP is also compatible with the latest versions of Chorme, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

WCP, is mostly referred to as a time reporting application, which is true, because 90% of the time an employee would use it for reporting time. As mentioned earlier the development team has incorporated certain HRIS features in to the application. Therefore, apart from time recording, reviewing time entries and creation of invoices to be sent to our clients, the system facilitates to manage certain employee details, manage employee leave (apply for and cancel leave, leave approval and dissemination of leave notifications), sending ‘arriving late’, ‘leaving early’ and ‘out of office’ notifications. In addition to these, WCP provides project managers with a range of sophisticated reports to help monitor and manage day to day activities. The administrator can manage users, clients and projects as well as assign leave and manage application wide configurations.

WCP has been developed over a considerable amount of time, which has in a way shaped the application to be a perfect fit for the operations at Mazarin. WCP version 1.8 is the current production version, but more features and improvements in user experience are currently being implemented.