I’ve been a bit buried of late working on swfs, creating user forms, adding content and redoing the Employee Communications website but I thought it is time I added a post about a new SaaS Tool we are adding to Younicycle.
Much of my ‘old – line’ business includes the entire process of Benefit Statements (Total Compensation Statements), to include data manipulation, design, print and fulfillment. Personalized, financial documents have more impact – but there is only so much information that you can squeeze onto one piece of paper, which leads to the topic at hand – SaaS and QR Code. If you aren’t familiar with QR Code ( a type of 2D barcode), it is definitely worth a look. Pretty interesting concept – an example:
SaaS QR Code
1) Create a document
2) Create a QR Code with entered data (example: ‘http://postgresql.org’)
3) Place the QR Code on your doc – and print it.
4) Assuming you have a smart phone (may require a small software install) – point your smart phone at the printed QR Code – and you will be prompted to ‘Go online’. If yes, you would be directed immediately to the web page for PostgreSQL (example).
Of course – the actual website page could also have a user form, where user info could be submitted. We already have all the other necessary SaaS Tools (database builder, query editor, report & pdf generator, CRON, etc), so it will be a snap to schedule the creation of a Report within an SaaS Account, which would in turn be emailed to us at a certain time each day.
Short version? Printed documents need not be ‘dead-end’, but can become living and allow for dynamic interaction.
So – I decided this is just too interesting to delay until 2010, so we are testing an implementation now on our testbox and should apply to our Production servers by the end of next week. We still have a few items that need to be added:
1) Allow creation not only of gif, jpg or png – but also eps – which can be scaled. This will allow creation of QR Code signage (say for a url of a restaurant menu – or a list of upcoming events) – really large output.
2) Add capability for QR Code color – and background color.
3) Add capability to use a datasource or a Table with values that will store the various settings and initial data input. This is where the Benefit Statements come back in play as we will be able to make personalized QR Code.
Below is the current GUI we used for testing. It will change significantly, as outlined above.
