Side Panes

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After you design a custom Project Guide, the next step is to create the side panes. The Project Guide uses Microsoft® Internet Explorer in a display area to show side pane content next to the Project view area within an HTML frame. The default Project Guide side pane content and script files use dynamic HTML (DHTML) and Microsoft JScript®, although side panes can be composed of any kind of content that Internet Explorer can host. Side panes and the Project Guide toolbar make up the user interface of the Project Guide; each side pane helps users perform a specific task.

Users can access side panes by opening the goal areas from the Project Guide toolbar. Each goal area contains one or more side panes that relate to tasks defined for that goal area. The following figure shows the Interviewer custom Project Guide sample for the Product Launch Template in the download. It has only one goal area; if you click the drop-down list box in the Project Guide toolbar, it shows three tasks: New Interview, Edit Interview, and Delete Interview. The side pane also shows those three tasks. For more information on the Interviewer samples, see Interviewer Wizard Project Guides: BizTalk Server Deployment and Product Launch.

Parts of the Project Guide

Parts of the Project Guide

About Adding Side Panes

Adding a side pane to the Project Guide is a three-step process:

  1. Create the side pane interface as an HTML page.
  2. Bind script to the side pane controls and event handlers to handle any communication with the Project object model.
  3. Add the side pane to the goal area framework so users can find it.

Let's consider the following scenario to see how you can use a side pane. You have just been hired by City Power & Light's Information Technology (IT) department. The IT managers are longtime Project users who want to start implementing a custom Project Guide. They are tracking a lot of plant construction and want to improve their critical path monitoring. They would like a Critical Path Monitor side pane that lets a user select a critical task, and then click Previous and Next buttons to navigate the critical path. They want the Critical Path Monitor added to the default Project Guide as a first step toward turning the default Project Guide into a City Power & Light Project Guide.

For more information on building side panes, see Side Pane Construction: DHTML.