Where-is Plugin

Some companies use TWiki more and more as a portal. We have Plugins that support that, such as LdapPlugin, LocalCityTimePlugin, RenderListPlugin, WeatherPlugin, etc.

Here is an idea for a Plugin that larger companies with mobile workers can use: Show the current location of an employee and status if online on the user's home page. Example:

• Where am I: %WHEREIS{ "PeterThoeny" }%

Which gets rendered as: (some examples)

• Where am I: Online in SanJoseOffice
• Where am I: Idle for 1 hours in SanJoseOffice
• Where am I: Idle for 2 hours in home office or travelling
• Where am I: Offline

The Plugin can extract the online information from the TWiki logs, and the location from the IP address. This assumes that TWiki remembers users by IP address.

The IT department assigns the IP address ranges for all office sites and dial-in/VPN. The Plugin needs to be made aware of this. It could be a table in the Plugin topic:

Anyone interested to ImplementIdeaBeforeTheCompetition?

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Nov 2004

The IP address table could be also user generated, e.g. with a "location not correct? fix it"

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Dec 2006

See related technology, Codev.Plazes, a web service that tracks where you are. Interestingly, the place information is maintained by the user base.

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Dec 2006