IBM Control Desk UI Next-Gen

In this article I’m showing you a brief preview of IBM Control Desk UI Next-Gen. As IBM-er I was fortunate enough to play with the new Control Desk before the go-live. I have been authorized by developer manager for this preview without showing details of next release.

As you known the internet has become an integrated, seamless, and often invisible part of our everyday lives. Changes in style, design, and interactions across the web have big implications for users, but even bigger implications for us as creators. How can we create optimal user experiences if we don’t at least have a basic knowledge of what the technology is capable of ?

Web 2.0 marked a cultural shift in how web pages were developed, designed, and used. It saw the meteoric rise of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, and user-generated content such as blogs, wikis and video sharing sites such as YouTube. It has also been linked with a particular visual style that includes the use of gradients, colourful icons, reflections, drop shadows, and large text, Web 2.0 is mashup which combine or render content in novel forms. Other more technical features, including a public API to allow third and embedding of various rich content types.

The IBM Control Desk UI Next-Gen is a Web 2.0 product !

Based on common principles of the IBM design language, the new UI looks familiar and is easy to use. Designed as a DevOps solution that is built on modern, open-source frameworks, it enables the Control Desk team to implement and deliver new capabilities quickly and frequently. Capabilities can also be adjusted according to the continuous feedback provided by clients.

With a few simple clicks, it’s now possible to customize the self-service catalog in terms of colours, labels and images. Users can also access familiar company themes. For example this is my custom user interface, I used Google palette and my IBM Watson logo.

The IBM Control Desk UI Next-Gen uses the Maximo 7.6.* / Control Desk Rest APIs to interact with system record layer.
The new user interface is built on an extremely flexible and extensible technology stack:

AngularJS: for the user interface.

NodeJS: for the server.

The service plugins extends the server by adding new rest API, you can implement a completely new set of API or can simply substitute the implementation of existent API with a different provider.

The Hi-level architecture is:

AngularJS artifacts supports the development and composition of the panels, the user interface is able to contain directives, services, filters, controllers, HTML layout and widgets. Use cases, user experience, styles along with best practices are delivered in the form of a theme:

Stay tuned for next update and prototype, your comments and suggestions are welcome.