Group Therapy

10/10/98


The Group Therapy project:

Group Therapy is a Windows based Reporting tool developed for a variety of customer support activities in the enviornment where I work. It is primarily a front end to collate information in netware user accounts from a given set of search criteria. It is not a tool specifically for administration, as none of the information or files residing on the servers can be altered.

Why Group Therapy? Group Therapy started out as a way to resolve the inquiries from our customer base regarding memberships in Noteworks e-mail groups. This inquiry would traditionally have to be directed to a system administrator to come up with the answer, in an often frustrating and time consuming beurocratic process, since the Noteworks client did not provide this information internally. For a group that could be spread across 20 departmental servers, such as a budget committe or leadership group this compounded the time required to collect this information. Wit h Group Therapy, and the new Formatting and Conversion utility (GCM) these inquries could be responded to in a matter of minutes. Group Therapy has undergone a number of GUI and functional changes since the initial development release in June. Case_books (or Pre-recorded macro functions) were added to the menu to pre-configure the search for a variety of missions. The File/Save feature allows collections exceeding Window's edit control's display limit to be stored on disk for further searching or archiving. The source code is written in Euphoria, a powerful interpreted language from Rapid Deployment Software. Euphoria has been paired with a number of enhancements from everyday users, such as the Win32 controls library from David Cuny, that Makes Group Therapy possible.