Efront LMS/LCMS Enterprise Manual (En)

eFront
Enterprise Version
eFront
Enterprise Version
EPIGNOSIS LTD
44, Katehaki, Athens, Greece, 11525 &
Patras Science Park, Stadiou Str, Platani, Patras, Greece, 265 04
email: info@epignosis.com.gr, info@efront.gr
phone: (+30) 210 6756008, (+30) 210 6756112
Fax: (+30) 210 6756527
eFront | Enterprise Version 2

CONTENTS
CONTENTS ............................................................................. 3
IMAGES LIST .......................................................................... 5
1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................. 7
2. CONCEPTS AND FEATURES ................................................... 7
2.1 USERS - EMPLOYEES ................................................................... 7
2.1.1 Roles ......................................................................................... 7
2.1.2 HCD Attributes ............................................................................ 8
2.2 BRANCHES .............................................................................. 10

2.3 JOB DESCRIPTIONS .................................................................... 10
2.4 SKILLS................................................................................... 11
2.5 EVALUATIONS .......................................................................... 11
2.6 HISTORY ................................................................................ 12
2.7 FILE MANAGER ......................................................................... 12
2.8 EMPLOYEE PRINTABLE FORMS ........................................................ 13
2.9 ORGANIZATIONAL CALENDAR ........................................................ 14
3. ADMINISTRATOR............................................................... 16
3.1 CONTROL PANEL ....................................................................... 16
3.2 BRANCHES .............................................................................. 16
3.2.1 Branch Review .......................................................................... 16
3.2.2 Branch Insertion ....................................................................... 17
3.2.3 Branch Editing .......................................................................... 17
3.2.4 Organization Chart .................................................................... 18

3.3.1 Job Description Review............................................................... 19
3.3.2 Job Description Insertion ............................................................ 19
3.3.3 Job Description Editing ............................................................... 20
3.4 SKILLS................................................................................... 21
3.4.1 Skills review ............................................................................. 21
3.4.2 Skill Insertion ........................................................................... 22
3.4.3 Skill Editing .............................................................................. 22

3.5 EMPLOYEES ............................................................................. 23
3.5.1 Employees review ..................................................................... 23
3.5.2 Employee insertion .................................................................... 24
3.5.3 Employee editing....................................................................... 26
3.5.4 Employee searching ................................................................... 28
3.6 LESSONS ................................................................................ 29

4. SUPERVISORS .................................................................. 31
4.1 CONTROL PANEL ....................................................................... 31
4.2 BRANCHES .............................................................................. 31
4.4 EMPLOYEES ............................................................................. 32
5. EMPLOYEES ...................................................................... 33
5.1 CONTROL PANEL ....................................................................... 33
5.2 EVALUATIONS .......................................................................... 33
6. MESSAGES ....................................................................... 34
7. TECHNOLOGIES ................................................................ 35

IMAGES LIST
Image 1: Form for HCD attributes management ............................................. 9
Image 2: A representation of the branches tree ............................................ 10
Image 3: The form for the job description data ............................................ 11
Image 4: Evaluations and History ............................................................... 12
Image 5: File manager interface ................................................................ 13
Image 6: Employee printable form ............................................................. 13
Image 7: Calendar interface ...................................................................... 14
Image 8: Calendar interface ...................................................................... 15
Image 9: Administrator Control Panel ......................................................... 16
Image 10: Branches List ........................................................................... 16
Image 11: Branch insertion ....................................................................... 17
Image 12: Branch editing interface ............................................................. 17
Image 13: Assign employees to branch menu .............................................. 18
Image 14: Set branch sub-branches ........................................................... 18
Image 15: Set branch’s job descriptions ...................................................... 18
Image 16: Organization chart .................................................................... 19
Image 17: List of job descriptions............................................................... 19
Image 18: Insertion of a new job description ............................................... 20
Image 19: Editing of job description ........................................................... 20
Image 20: Job description to skills .............................................................. 21
Image 21: Job description to lessons .......................................................... 21
Image 22: Skills list ................................................................................. 22
Image 23: Skill insertion form.................................................................... 22
Image 24: Skill editing.............................................................................. 23
Image 25: Mass skill assignment to employees ............................................ 23
Image 26: Employee list ........................................................................... 24
Image 27: Employee insertion form ............................................................ 25
Image 28: Employee placements’ management ............................................ 26
Image 29: Employee to skills management tab ............................................ 27
Image 30: Employee to skills management tab ............................................ 27
Image 31: Employee to User Groups management ....................................... 28

Image 32: Assigning a lesson to an employee ............................................. 28
Image 33: Employee searching: employees at “Head department” criterion ...... 29
Image 34: Lessons to skills management .................................................... 29
Image 35: Lessons to skills management .................................................... 31
Image 36: Employee type control panel ...................................................... 33
Image 37: Professor’s menu for adding evaluations to employees ................... 33
Image 38: New message interface in eFront Enterprise™ ............................... 34

1. INTRODUCTION
The Enterprise version of eFront (eFront Enterprise™) integrates an advanced
Human Capital Development (HCD) subsystem. The HCD offers a coherent
approach to the management of an organization's most valued assets - the
people working in the company who individually and collectively contribute to the
achievement of the objectives of the business. Following the eFront philosophy,
this module focuses on comprehensibility and user-friendliness. Meanwhile, its
“smooth” integration with the standard features of the platform retains their ease
of use, while facilitating the understanding of the organizational extensions.
The HCD component provides a wide range of functionalities from personnel

management to branches and group organization. Specifically, standard eFront
users are treated as employees with extended information. Moreover, employees
can be assigned to branches and job descriptions, which in turn differentiate their
permission privileges regarding the management of other employees or their
access to advanced HCD features. This approach allows eFront Enterprise™ to
be used at any level of the company hierarchy, rendering eFront an LMS with
extended organization support.
2. CONCEPTS AND FEATURES

This chapter provides a brief presentation of the basic features of eFront
Enterprise™. Though the enterprise platform revolves around the personnel
management, there are seven distinct entities that can be identified.
2.1 USERS - EMPLOYEES

2.1.1 Roles
The core eFront platform supports three basic user roles: Administrator, Professor
and Student, with each role having a different interface. The organizational
component retains the same user categorization, but adds a second level of user
differentiation, namely the one regarding their role in the company hierarchy. In
this respect, users (or from this point on employees), are divided into three
categories: Administrators, Supervisors and Employees. The first role has actually
the same meaning as in the learning component of eFront: it gives access to
every operation and management of any other employee. The other two roles are
defined for each employee when jobs are assigned to each of them. A Supervisor
has administrator rights to any employee of the branch where he is assigned as a
supervisor, as well as to all of its sub-branches. Moreover, a large subset of the
Administrator HCD-related functionalities is also provided to a supervisor. On the
other hand, users that have the role of an Employee, have limited access, which
mainly relates to information flow and communication means from and to the
upper levels of the organization hierarchy.

A point that needs special clarification at this point is that in eFront Enterprise™
an employee cannot simultaneously have supervisor and employee roles for the
same branch. In order for this feature to be guaranteed, the following convention
is followed:
• If an employee has already a placement at a branch as an employee and is

then assigned another one in the same branch as a supervisor, he or she
is automatically promoted to that branch (and all of its sub-branches) to a
supervisor.
• On the other hand, if an employee is a supervisor at a branch and then

assigned another job at that branch as an employee he retains his
supervising role, and his role to the newly assigned job is upgraded.
• Every time an employee loses his or her supervisor role in a branch, then,
unless that employee is a supervisor at a higher level in the organization
hierarchy, all supervisor rights to the sub-branches, where that employee
does not have supervisor placements, are recalled.
• If a supervisor is removed from his or her last placement as a supervisor,

that employee is demoted to a simple employee.
In the following chapters where each organizational operation is presented,

further details on the differentiation of the three aforementioned roles will be
provided.
2.1.2 HCD Attributes
An efficient HCD system needs to maintain many more information for each
employee than the name, surname and email data, maintained by the learning
component of eFront. These attributes are divided into temporal and non-
temporal data as shown in table 1.
Non-temporal Temporal
• Name, Surname, Father name • Marital status

• Gender • Office number, telephone
• Date, city, country of birth • Email
• Nationality • Address, city, country
• Date of hiring, leaving • Telephone, mobile phone
• Work permission data • Working hours, employment
type
• Police Id number
• Wage
• Vat Reg. No, Tax office
• Bank, Account
• Driver license
• Means of transport
• National service completed
Table 1: HCD Attributes

These attributes provide adequate information for the effective management of
each employee to his supervisors. Nevertheless, administrators always have the
possibility of adding new fields to further customize user profiles to the needs of
the organization.
Image 1: Form for HCD attributes management
All users have access to their personal record and are allowed to edit some of
their data. This access is granted through the “Personal Data” link under the
“Tools” tab of the left side frame. More specifically, employees are allowed to edit
their records, but cannot change the following pieces of information:
• Job descriptions
• Basic learner type
• Hired on, left on dates
• Employment type, Working As and Work Permission Data
• Wage
• National service
The notion behind this discrimination is rather obvious: each user of the system is
allowed to edit his personal records, but not any of those that affect his position
in the company or in the educational process.

2.2 BRANCHES
The concept of branches extends to every level of the organization structure. A
branch may refer to a building, to any of the departments inside the building, to
every division of each department, even to each group inside of every
departmental division. Each branch has at most one father branch and may have
any number of sub-branches and employees working in the branch.
Consequently, the branches structure is organized as a tree of branches and
employees as shown in image 2. It is worth mentioning, that more than one root
branches may exist.
Image 2: A representation of the branches tree
2.3 JOB DESCRIPTIONS

One of the most important operations of an HCD system is to be able to assign
jobs to the personnel it is managing. Administrators and supervisors are allowed
to create job descriptions for the jobs they want to assign to their employees.
Jobs are defined from their name, from a brief description of the role they entail,
from the branch in which they are assigned, from the number of vacancies for
this job description and from the skills that are required for this job. The form for
the management of those pieces of information – beside skills, which are
managed differently - is shown in image 3.
eFront Enterprise™ offers full customization of job descriptions by

differentiating similar job descriptions from one branch to another. This means
that the salesman/saleswoman may have different analytical description, vacancy
number or prerequisite skills from one branch to another: obviously salesmen of
stationary at the “Desk equipment” branch have significant differences with
salesmen at the “PC sales department” or at the “Manuals and books” department
of the organization.

Image 3: The form for the job description data
2.4 SKILLS
The skills management is of critical importance to an HCD system. Knowing the
current skill-set of an employee, correlating skills to job descriptions, training
employees to acquire new skills and identifying the most suitable employee for
each job assignment according to his skills are some of the most useful features
offered by this module. Administrators and supervisors are thus able to evaluate
skill shortages in the current personnel of the company and try to plan training
programs to improve the level of their employees and consequently the total
quality of the organization.
When an employee has a skill then the latter is assigned to him or her together
with a specification that describes how the employee is related to skill. For
example an employee may be assigned the skill “Work experience” and use as
specification “2 years of work experience as desk salesman”.
2.5 EVALUATIONS
Another important feature of the eFront Enterprise™ is evaluation management
for the system’s employees. This enables administrators and supervisors to add
any kind of positive or negative comments for staff members,
the evaluations of other supervisors. This feature offers thus invaluable
information on the profile of each employee, facilitating the personnel
management from the Human Resources Manager of a company.

Image 4: Evaluations and History
2.6 HISTORY
The system offers a history mechanism for all employees of the system. This
entails keeping a diary-like record for each employee, containing information like
date of hiring, job assignment or reassignment, acquisition of skills, lesson
subscription, wage change etc. The supervisors of each employee have
permission to review this record, get a fast preview of the employee’s history in
the company and reach decisions regarding future promotions, wage raises etc.
2.7 FILE MANAGER

The eFront Enterprise™ allows employees to exchange files with each other by
providing common folder management features. Each employee has a private, a
public and a supervisor-only folder, which allow the uploading of personal,
publicly available and available only to the employee’s supervisors’ files
respectively. Access control is enforced so that only authorized personnel may
view and download files that exist in the private and supervisor-only folders of
the employee.
The file manager module bears several file system functionalities like creating
new subfolders, renaming files and copying or moving files to different folders.
Finally, folders and files can be zipped into compressed files for archiving. The
interface of the file manager for the contents of the publicly available folder is
shown in image 5:

Image 5: File manager interface
2.8 EMPLOYEE PRINTABLE FORMS

It is vital for the organization to be able to export the information held by the
system for each employee. Therefore, the eFront Enterprise™ automatically
creates a printable form for each employee. This form contains several basic
pieces of information for the employee, like photo, age, address, occupation in
the company and date of hiring. If no photo is provided, then the employee’s
avatar in the eFront system will be used. All registered skills for this employee
like work experience, degrees and soft skills are also presented on the form.
Moreover, all evaluations written for this employee together with their author are
printed in a chronological order. Finally, the mark for each lesson the employee
attended is provided, in order to show the employee’s progress in the learning
process. Therefore, employee forms comprise an excellent way to acquire the
most significant employee information and have them printed. Such a form is
shown in image 6.
Image 6: Employee printable form

2.9 ORGANIZATIONAL CALENDAR
eFront Enterprise™ offers an extension to the original calendar, by setting a
secondary view as well: the organization one. In this respect, calendars contain in
this version Educational and Organizational events. However, since calendars are
editable only by professors in the Educational view, several changes have been
made to the system’s interface. A “Calendar” link has been added to the
administrator menu under the “Tools” tab on the left hand sidebar frame.
Moreover, regarding the coexistence of the two views for the calendar, we have
the following conventions:
• Administrators can only see and add Organizational view events
• Professors can see and add both Educational and Organizational events.
The Educational events regard the lessons that they teach.
• Students can see both Educational and Organizational events, but can only
add Organizational events. The Educational events regard the lessons that
they attend.
It is obvious, that the Organizational role (administrator, supervisor or employee)

is indifferent to the process of adding or not organizational events.
Clicking on the calendar link, redirects the user to a page created only for
calendar management, as shown in image 7. On the upper right corner of the
page appears a drop down menu with two values: Educational and Organization
profile. Hovering the mouse over the calendar shows the events for each day that
correspond to the current view only.
Image 7: Calendar interface
Clicking on the “Add Event” link over the calendar on the left opens a popup,
which allows insertion of events. A drop down menu in this popup designates
whether the new event will refer to a specific lesson (Educational) or to the
Organization profile of the calendar. A user-friendly “Submit and add another”
button is provided to allow multiple consecutive calendar event insertions.

Image 8: Calendar interface

3. ADMINISTRATOR
This chapter presents the basic administrative functions that relate to the HCD
module of eFront. All functionalities of the HCD module are shown under a tab
called “Organization” in the left sidebar frame of the eFront window.
3.1 CONTROL PANEL

The first link of the Administrator HCD menu links to the following page, which in
turn links to the basic functionalities the administrator can perform regarding the
management of the company.
Image 9: Administrator Control Panel
Obviously, these links point to the pages that correspond to the five of the seven
distinct functionalities of the eFront Enterprise™, as described in the previous
chapter. The evaluations and history functionalities are managed and previewed
respectively at the “Employees” page.
3.2 BRANCHES
3.2.1 Branch Review
The first page that is shown to the employee when he selects the “Branches” link
is a list of all registered branches. Each branch is listed together with its location,
the employees that work in it and its father branch as shown in image 10.
Image 10: Branches List
Clicking on the name of a branch, or the “Edit” icon underneath the “Operations”
column links to the “Branch editing” page (chapter 3.2.3). Otherwise, clicking on
the “Delete” icon under the “Operations” column, deletes the branch and all of its
sub-branches in the organization chart after a positive response to a relative
confirmation question.

3.2.2 Branch Insertion
The first task an administrator needs to perform regards the insertion to the
system of the branches that comprise the organization hierarchy. This is done by
clicking on the “New Branch” link on the top left corner of the –initially empty-
branches list. The form used to perform this operation, which is shown in image
11, allows the insertion of location information, contact data as well as positioning
in the company hierarchy, through definition of the father branch of the newly
inserted branch. Each branch has zero or one father-branches, an approach which
renders the organization chart as a tree with (potentially) multiple roots. Finally,
if the assignment of a father branch will create a circular chain in the hierarchy,
then it will be perceived as illegal by the system and disregarded.
Image 11: Branch insertion
3.2.3 Branch Editing
Image 12 shows the branch-editing page. The initial page shows the registered
branch data, which can be changed and re-submitted, and below a list with all
employees currently assigned to the branch. The other three tabs on top of the
page perform the following tasks:
Image 12: Branch editing interface

• Assign Employees: A list of all employees, both assigned and not assigned to
the branch. This tab provides an easy way to assign many jobs to many
employees on the same form.
Image 13: Assign employees to branch menu
• Sub-branches: A form same as the “Branches List” page of Image 13, having
an “Insert Sub-branch” link on top of the list, which points to a form like the
one shown in Image 11. Upon submission of the new sub-branch the user will
automatically return to the branch-editing page.
Image 14: Set branch sub-branches
• Job descriptions: A form that lists all job descriptions that have been defined
for the branch. If no job descriptions are defined, then no employees can be
assigned to a branch, since all assignments are done when an employee
acquires a job placement at a branch. A “New Job Description” link enables
administrators to directly add a job description to this branch and return after
its submission to the branch-editing page.
Image 15: Set branch’s job descriptions
3.2.4 Organization Chart
The organization chart is accessed through the link with the same name on the
administrator’s control panel. The chart (Image 16) shows all branches with their

sub-branches and their employees. Administrators can hover over any of the links
to find out more information about a branch or an employee or click on any of it
to directly add the corresponding “Edit” page, whether it refers to “Edit branch”
(chapter 3.2.3) or “Edit Employee” (chapter 3.3.3).
Image 16: Organization chart

3.3.1 Job Description Review
All job descriptions are shown in the job description list, which is the first page
linked by the “Job descriptions” link on the control panel of the administrator.
Next to each job description appear the name of the branch to which this
placement belongs, the number of employees assigned this job, the vacancies for
this job description and the skills required by it. The number under the vacancies
column refers to the difference between the “Vacancies” number inserted into the
respective field on the job description insertion form (see chapter 3.3.2) and the
number under the “Currently employed” column. The last column provides links
to the two operations on an existing job description: editing and deletion. Editing
a job description is explained in chapter 3.3.3. On the other hand, deleting a job
description, removes the specified job from that branch, after a positive response
to a confirmation question. It is noted here, that the deletion of the job
description “Salesman” from a branch, does not affect other jobs described as
“Salesman” at different branches.
Image 17: List of job descriptions
3.3.2 Job Description Insertion

The second task an administrator needs to perform is inserting job descriptions to
branches, in order to assign them afterwards to the employees of the system.
This task is performed by clicking on the “New Job Description” link on the top left
corner of the –initially empty- job descriptions’ list.
Job descriptions can be inserted either to a single branch all to all branches of the
organization. As mention in chapter 2, the same job description can be
differentiated for different branches, thus offering maximum customization per
branch needs. However, for efficiency and user-friendliness, the functionality of
adding the same job description to all branches is also provided, by selecting “All
branches” from the drop down menu next to the “Branch Name” field, as
demonstrated in image 17.
Image 18: Insertion of a new job description
For example, in image 18 the “Vacancies” field for the “Manager” job description
at the “Head Department” branch equals to 1. However, 1 employee is already
assigned to that job description. Therefore, the number for the “Vacancies”
column regarding that job description equals to 1 minus 1, namely zero. The skills
required is the sum of all skills that are set as prerequisites for each job
placement, through the process described in chapter (3.3.3)
3.3.3 Job Description Editing
Editing the data of a job description entails changing any of the information
stored for that placement at the designated branch. It is worth mentioning, that if
the “All branches” choice is selected from the drop down menu next to the
“Branch Name” label, then the change will affect all job descriptions at all
Image 19: Editing of job description

branches. Below the form with the job description data, a list of all employees
working at the selected job description is shown.
The next tab in the job description-editing page is used to correlate job
descriptions to skills. This happens with a user-friendly method, which registers
this assignment or re-assignment with a simple click on the corresponding skill.
Image 20: Job description to skills
The same method, where a simple click on the checkbox immediately makes the
assignment without any submission button, is used in the third tab called
“Associated lessons”. This tab provides a list of all registered lessons to the
system. Next to the record of each lesson appear the category it belongs to, the
language used for it as well as the number of skills provided upon completion of
that lesson. This assignment of skills to lessons is explained in chapter 3.6. If no
skills are offered then a relevant message is shown for this lesson. The final
column contains a checkbox: upon checking it, the job description under editing is
correlated to that lesson. Un-checking a checked lesson dissolves that
relationship.
Associating a job description to a lesson leads to the automatic subscription to

that lesson, of all employees currently having or undertaking in the future this job
description.
Image 21: Job description to lessons
3.4 SKILLS
3.4.1 Skills review
The page pointed to by the “Skills” link on the administrator Organizational

control panel shows the list of skills that have been inserted to the system. Each
entry contains the description of each skill and the number of employees
currently designated to possess it. Over the top left corner of the table exists the
“New Skill” link, which provides the skill- insertion operation, as explained in
3.4.2. The last column of the skills list has two operations: edit and delete.
Information on editing a skill is provided in chapter 3.4.3. Deleting a skill, after
positively answering to a relevant confirmation question, entails deleting the skill

description and removing it from the skill list of all employees currently
possessing it.
Image 22: Skills list
3.4.2 Skill Insertion
Though branches and job descriptions suffice to provide the basic eFront
Enterprise™ functionalities, like job assignments and employee management,
skills have a very significant role as well. Management of skills is one of the most
important tasks a human resource manager needs to perform, and therefore it is
suggested that a basic set of skills is inserted into the system as a third step,
before the employees’ accounts are created. Skills can be very easily registered
to the system, since all that needs to be provided for each of them, is a general
description, like “Work Experience”, degrees like “Bachelor” or “MBA” or soft skills
like “Intelligence”, “Diligence” or “Communicative”. When an employee is actually
assigned a skill, then an appropriate text specification is also entered. For
example, the specification for an employee having “Work Experience” could be “2
years programmer, 3 years project manager”.
Image 23: Skill insertion form
3.4.3 Skill Editing
Skills can be edited either be clicking on their description link anywhere it can be
found in the eFront Enterprise™ environment or by clicking on the “Edit” icon
under the operation’s column on the skills’ list. The form that appears is shown in
image 24. Changing and submitting the value next to the “Skill Description” field
alters the name of the description, wherever it appears. Underneath the submit
button, exists a list of all employees currently possessing that skill together with
the specification given for each of them. Special attention needs to be given to
the “Operations” column on the right side of the table: the “Edit” and “Delete”
functionalities refer to this skill being assigned to the employee of each record.
This means that clicking on the edit icon will redirect the administrator to the
employee-editing page (chapter 3.5.3) and more specifically to the “Skills” tab.

Similarly, the deletion operation removes this skill from this employee: neither
the skill nor the employee themselves.
Image 24: Skill editing
The second tab of the skill-editing page is used to massively assign skills to
employees. Each time an employee is selected from the list by clicking on the
corresponding checkbox under the “Check” column, the specification field will
appear and the administrator may insert the relevant piece of information. If an
employee that already has the skill assigned is un-checked then this skill is
removed from his or her skill set, when the “Apply Changes” button is clicked.
Finally, the administrator may change the specification of an existing skill
assignment to an employee by changing the corresponding field. This process is
shown in image 25.
Image 25: Mass skill assignment to employees
3.5 EMPLOYEES
3.5.1 Employees review
Having inserted branches, job descriptions and skills the administrator is now able
to insert employees into the system with all functionalities enabled. Otherwise, if
branches or job descriptions are not defined, then though employee accounts
may be created, no job positions can be assigned. On the other hand, if no skills

are registered, no actual human resources management can take place, while no
employee printable forms (chapter 3.5.3) will be complete.
The main page of the employees’ management part of the eFront Enterprise™
is linked by the “Employees” link on the administrative control panel and shows a
list of all registered employee accounts. Every record of the table shows the login
name of the user in the eFront system, his or her actual name and surname, the
preferred language for the system and the number of job assignments in all
branches. Three more columns are provided for each record, which correspond to
four different functionalities: the first enables or disables an employee account in
the system. The second, under the column “Reports”, shows employee statistics,
while the other two refer to the “Edit” and “Delete” operations, presented in the
previous chapters as well. Editing an employee will be explained in chapter 3.5.3.
Deleting an employee, entails removing all employee data from the system: job
descriptions and skills assigned, evaluations and history, as well as any piece of
personal information on that employee account. Since this operation incurs such a
change to the system, a confirmation window is used to ensure the administrator
selection. As always, over the top left corner of the table, exists the “New
employee” link, which leads to the creation of a new employee account, as
explained in the following chapter.
Image 26: Employee list
3.5.2 Employee insertion
Clicking on the “New employee” link leads to the employee insertion page, which
contains a form with extended info fields for each employee. Though the actual
number of information fields is about thirty, only five of them are required:
• Login: the employee’s login name in the eFront system
• Password/Repeat password: The password that the employee will use

to enter into the system. Both fields must have the same value
• Name/Surname: The real name of the employee
If branches have already been inserted into the system, before the employee’s
account creation, then the administrator is able to assign a job description right
away, during employee insertion to the system. This approach facilitates the

organizational role definition for each employee, since HCD roles are determined
whenever job descriptions are associated with
It must be underlined at this point that each employee is still assigned with a role
relevant to the learning part of eFront, namely “administrator”, “professor” or
“student”. As for the role regarding the organizational aspect of each employee, it
is determined according to the following three rules:
• If a user has a learning role of an “administrator” then this user also has
an administrative role in the HCD aspect of the system
• If a user is assigned even one job description as a supervisor then he

acquires the “supervisor” role. However, he has supervising permissions
only in the branch(es) where he is assigned a job description (and the
corresponding sub-branches).
• Otherwise, or by default, all employees are considered to have the

“Employee” role, with a minimum set of organization privileges.
Image 27: Employee insertion form

3.5.3 Employee editing
Every time an employee’s login is encountered in the system it has the form of a
link. Clicking on it, redirects the administrator to the page of editing the
employee. The first tab of that page is the same with the one of image 27,
whereas each piece of information registered during employee creation appears
next to the corresponding fields. Any field value may change, thus leading to the
same alteration upon form submission. If branches are defined, then selecting a
branch and a job description make this assignment to the employee, when the
form is submitted. If the employee already had a job description then:
• changing the job description to another non-empty value deletes the

existing job description and sets the new one (job re-assignment)
• changing the job description to an empty value removes the existing job
from the employee.
However, each employee may have more than one job description in more than
one branch. Therefore, the second tab of the editing page enables assignments of
more jobs to the employee, by one job at every submission. As shown in image
22, that tab contains a table with all job descriptions the employee currently has,
together with the role for that placement. Two operations are permitted here:
• Inserting a new job description: Clicking on the “New Job Description”

triggers the appearance of new empty row in the table of the tab.
Selecting the values for the new job description and clicking on submit,
assigns the new placement to the employee.
• Deleting a job description: Clicking on the “Delete” icon under the

“Operations” column, removes the corresponding placement from the
employee’s jobs list.
Assignments and deletions of job descriptions follow the conventions explained in

chapter 2.1.1.
Image 28: Employee placements’ management
The third tab offers the employee to skills management feature. More specifically
all registered skills of the system are shown and next to each one that is
possessed by the employee, exists a specification and a selected checkbox. If the
specification changes, then the respective skill assignment to the employee
changes as well. If an unchecked record is checked, then this skill is assigned to
the employee, while if the opposite occurs then the skill is removed from the

employee skill set. All of the aforementioned changes take place once the submit
button is clicked. Finally, the “New Skill” link over the top left corner provides the
ability to add skills into the system on the spot, through the form of image 23,
and return immediately to the employee to skills management tab, in order to
add the newly created skill.
Image 29: Employee to skills management tab
The next tab in the employee-editing menu regards the evaluations and the
history of this employee. Both concepts have been thoroughly explained in
chapters 2.5 and 2.6 respectively and are shown in image 4. It is important to
remind that the history table is not editable in any way: no records can be
inserted or deleted. On the other hand, evaluations are manipulated in the same
way as any other entity. A list of all evaluations together with their subject and
author name is listed chronologically. On the rightmost column called
“Operations” exist the “Edit” and “Delete” icons, which provide the corresponding
functionalities. Administrators are allowed to view and change any evaluation, a
fact that is not true for supervisors, which can only modify their own evaluations,
as we will see in the next chapter. Moreover, over the top left side of the
evaluations’ table exists the “New evaluation” link, which redirects to a form for
adding the data for the new evaluation. This form, used by both “New evaluation”
and “Edit” links, is shown in image 30.
Image 30: Employee to skills management tab
The fifth tab is the “File Record”, which provides the File Manager interface to the
administrator. The administrator can interact with every employee in four ways:
• Get/set a file from/to this employee’s public folder.
• Get/set a file from/to this employee’s supervisor area. Only this

employee’s supervisors have access rights to that folder
• Publish a file to administrator public folder, for everyone to see
The next tab is the “Employee Form”, which shows a digest of the employee’s
record as explained in chapter 2.8. The following tab provides User Groups
management. A list with all user groups is shown and the administrator can

assign or remove an employee from a group. User groups serve as an alternate
way to differentiate employees and group them together.
Image 31: Employee to User Groups management
Users that belong to the same User Group can be automatically assigned with the
same skills, job descriptions or lessons.
The final two tabs of the employee-editing page regard the lessons and the
courses that the employee under review is attending or can select respectively.
Since the administrator defines lessons and course assignments, this is one of the
two places in the eFront Enterprise™, where this operation can be performed.
Both tabs are divided in lessons and courses and enable an administrator to
assign or remove a lesson or a course from an employee, by selecting or un-
selecting the correct checkbox. This interface is shown in the image below.
Image 32: Assigning a lesson to an employee
3.5.4 Employee searching
Under the Employees tab on the left hand sidebar frame, you can fine the “Search
for employee” link. This points to a page, which enables the administrator to find
all employees that fulfill several criteria. The administrator can select whether all
criteria or at least one must be fulfilled in order for the system to return an
employee record. This is done with a radio box, with two selections: “Satisfy all
criteria” and “Satisfy any criteria”. Underneath the radio box, exist three drop
down menus, which correspond to the criteria for branches, job descriptions and
skills. Every time a new value is set in any of these menus, the page reloads and
the employees fulfilling the determined criteria are presented as a list.

Image 33: Employee searching: employees at “Head department” criterion
Furthermore, the page consists of a second tab, which has all fields that describe
an employee as shown in image 27. The administrator can fill in any of those
fields and submit the “Advanced criteria” form. From this point all subsequent
searches will take into account the values of the fields completed. It goes without
saying that, even when advanced search criteria are set, the “Satisfy all criteria”
and “Satisfy any criteria”, continue to apply.
3.6 LESSONS
Lesson and courses management is a core of the Standard eFront Edition.
Nevertheless, the correlation of lessons and skills that applies in the
organizational aspect of eFront leads into a relevant extension for the Enterprise
Edition. Therefore, a new tab is added in the lessons management page, pointed
to by the “Lessons” link under the “Lessons” tab on the left hand sidebar frame.
This tab, which is shown in image 34, allows administrators to associate lessons
and skills, together with skill specifications. This implies, that upon successful
completion of the lesson, all attending employees will acquire each skill selected
here together with its specification. If the employee already has one of the
associated skills, then the specification on his skill is extended with the one
provided for the skill acquired by the lesson. For example, if a user has the skill
“MS Office Knowledge” with specification “MS Word and Excel” and attends a
lesson “Databases” with skill specification for “MS Office Knowledge” “MS Access”,
then the final specification of this employee for the skill after the completion of
the “Databases” lesson will be “MS Word and Excel, MS Access”.
Image 34: Lessons to skills management

Finally, much like the skills management tab in the employees-editing page, a
“New skill” link enables the administrator to add skills on the spot and then return
to the lessons to skills tab to correlate the newly created skill with that lesson.

4. SUPERVISORS
Supervisors are very similar to administrators. In a sense they are administrators
but only in a subset of branches, namely in the branches they supervise, having
control over the employees they supervise, which are the ones working in their
branches. As mentioned before, the branches the supervisors supervise are either
the ones where they have a job description assigned as supervisors, or the sub-
branches of those branches.
The difference between the administrator and supervisor types regards the fact
that supervisors are less involved with system operations. Therefore, they do not
have any access rights on lesson or skill management operations, as the
administrators do. Since the two types are very much alike, the following
presentation of the supervisor type will only mention the differences from the
operations mentioned in chapter 3 for administrators.
4.1 CONTROL PANEL

The control panel of a supervisor has two differences with the one of a supervisor.
The first is that no “Skills” link exists, since supervisors are not allowed to add
skills, and secondly the file manager link is replaced by the “Placements” link. The
placements link is a link pointing to a page showing all job descriptions this
supervisor currently possesses, like the one in image 28. The difference here is
that the supervisor is not allowed to add any job descriptions to himself and
therefore the “New Job Description” link is missing.
Image 35: Lessons to skills management
As will be clearer from the following presentation the basic logic behind every
supervisor management operation is that it is limited to the branches that he or
she supervises. The same thing applies for branches, job descriptions and
employees. It is worth mentioning here that the eFront Enterprise™ is designed
in such a way, so that it facilitates the correct usage of the functionalities from
supervisors, by limiting their choices of branches with the use of drop down
menus, with predetermined values.
4.2 BRANCHES
Supervisors are allowed to view all registered branches in the initial branches list
or the organization chart. However, they have permission to edit only the ones
they supervise. Moreover, another significant difference with administrator
branches’ management is that, though a supervisor can still add a branch into the

organization hierarchy, the father branch of that newly created branch must be
supervised by this supervisor. The notion behind this is that only an administrator
can create new unrelated branches on the top of the hierarchy.

Supervisors are allowed to view all registered job descriptions in the initial job
descriptions’ list. However, they have permission to edit only the ones that are
assigned to a branch they supervise. Furthermore, though supervisors are
allowed to insert new job descriptions, they can only perform this operation, if
they set as a branch one of the branches they supervise.
4.4 EMPLOYEES
Employee management varies somehow from the branches and job description
one. The first difference is that the initial list of employees does not contain all
employees and limits access to the ones supervised, but only shows the latter
group. This means that a supervisor will be oblivious of the existence of an
employee that works at a branch on a higher lever of the branches hierarchy, a
reasonable choice considering that there is no need for the supervisor to know
this piece of information. On the other hand, if an employee is not currently
assigned to any branch, then the supervisor is allowed to view the data and
designate job descriptions to that employee.
Another difference is that employees inserted or edited by the supervisor can only
be assigned a placement in one of the branches that supervisor supervises. It is
worth mentioning, that these assignments can also involve assignments of
employees to job descriptions as supervisors. In other words, supervisors have
the ability to “create” other supervisors. Nevertheless, these supervisors will have
at most the same access rights as the supervisors that created them.
Since supervisors are not allowed to add skills, the “New Skill” link is missing
from the employee editing at the employee-to-skills tab.
Another difference regards the evaluation tab of the same page. Though
administrators have access and management rights on every evaluation, this
feature does not apply for supervisors, which are allowed to edit or delete only
their own evaluations. However, they still have permission to view evaluations
regarding a specific employee from other administrators or supervisors, as long of
course as they supervise this employee.
Finally, to what regards employee searching, there always exists the

predetermined criterion that the employee must be either unassigned or working
at a branch supervised by this supervisor. Any employee not fulfilling any of these
two requirements will never be returned as matching any other search criteria.

5. EMPLOYEES
5.1 CONTROL PANEL
Employees do not have any managerial privileges. eFront Enterprise™ provides
information on the work aspect of a system’s user. Therefore, employees may see
which job descriptions their supervising colleagues have assigned to them as well
as view information for the company branches, through the organization chart of
image. These two functionalities are provided through the employee’s control
panel, as shown in the image below.
Image 36: Employee type control panel
5.2 EVALUATIONS
In other words a user of type “Employee” cannot edit any other employee-
records, branches, skills or job descriptions. There exists only one exception to
that rule: if an “Employee” has the educational role of a “Professor”, then that
user may add evaluations to the users that attend this employee’s lessons. This
functionality is offered at the “Certificates” option on the lesson management
control panel. This is the menu that appears once the professor clicks on the
name of a specific lesson he or she teaches. Clicking on the “Certificates” link
leads to the page of image 37. Under the rightmost column, called “Functions”,
exist three operations regarding certificates. The leftmost option provides the
functionality of adding a new evaluation to the employee of that record, through
the form of image 29.
Image 37: Professor’s menu for adding evaluations to employees

6. MESSAGES
One of the basic communication means of the eFront system is the messaging
service, to which all employees regarding the organizational role have access.
eFront Enterprise™ offers a significant enhancement in the messaging service
of the system by integrating company related user groups in recipients’ selection
process of a new message. The final menu offers eight different recipients’
selection, which correspond to the choices in the upper part of the “New Message”
window, as shown in image 38.
Image 38: New message interface in eFront Enterprise™
These categories are the following:
• Only recipients defined in the field below: The message will be sent
only to the recipients whose logins are completed in the “Additional
Recipients” field on the lower part of the page (which uses an auto
complete service to facilitate this process).
• All active system employees: All system users who have their account
activated by an administrator or supervisor.
• Employees of branches: the employees that have a job description

assigned at the designated branch will receive the message. If the
“Include sub-branches” selection is activated, then the message will also
be sent to all employees of the sub-branches as well. The system allows
further customization of the recipients’ list, by providing the feature of
limiting the employees that receive the message, only to the ones having
a specific job description, inside the designated branch(es). This is done by
selecting an appropriate value in the “With job description” drop down
menu as well

• With job description: The message will be sent to all employees having
that job description, at any branch.
• Employees with skill: All employees that possess the selected skill,
indifferent of the specification describing this assignment, will receive that
message
• Employees of group: Employees that belong to a certain user group will

receive the message
• Employees involved with lesson: All employees that are involved with a
lesson, either as professors or students are going to receive the message.
• Specific type of employee: The message will be sent to all system users
belonging to the selected system type.
The lower part of the “New message” page is similar with the one of the Classic
Edition eFront. The additional recipients field is completed via auto complete, with
employee logins, separated with semicolon, or with ‘%’ to be sent to all
employees or ‘[*]’ to be sent to all students of the current user, if that user is of
a “Professor” type. Finally, the eFront Enterprise™ offers the option of sending
this message as an email as well, using the email addresses that have been
provided for the employees.
7. TECHNOLOGIES
eFront Enterprise™ is based on the following technologies:
1. Ν-tier system architecture (Distinguishing appearance, functionalities and

database)
2. User friendly interface through web browser (ΙΕ, Firefox ή Opera)
3. Usage of web technologies and protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, DHTML, PHP,
AJAX, SCORM, LDAP, UNICODE
4. Storage and preservation of data into a relational database (MYSQL)
5. Multilanguage support (use of UNICODE)
6. Small web pages to lower bandwidth requirements and facilitate the efficient
eFront system usage even for dial-up connections
7. Data integrity and system security through access control mechanisms for the
Information System (usage of login/password for each employee)
8. Efficient operation behind firewalls or over SSL channels.

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eFront

eFront | Enterprise Version 2

2.1.2 HCD Attributes ............................................................................ 8

2.2 BRANCHES .............................................................................. 10

3.2.2 Branch Insertion ....................................................................... 17

3.2.3 Branch Editing .......................................................................... 17

3.2.4 Organization Chart .................................................................... 18

3.3 JOB DESCRIPTIONS .................................................................... 19

3.3.2 Job Description Insertion ............................................................ 19

3.3.3 Job Description Editing ............................................................... 20

3.4.2 Skill Insertion ........................................................................... 22

3.4.3 Skill Editing .............................................................................. 22

eFront | Enterprise Version 3

3.5.2 Employee insertion .................................................................... 24

3.5.3 Employee editing....................................................................... 26

3.5.4 Employee searching ................................................................... 28

3.6 LESSONS ................................................................................ 29

eFront | Enterprise Version 4

Image 2: A representation of the branches tree ............................................ 10

Image 3: The form for the job description data ............................................ 11

Image 4: Evaluations and History ............................................................... 12

Image 5: File manager interface ................................................................ 13

Image 6: Employee printable form ............................................................. 13

Image 7: Calendar interface ...................................................................... 14

Image 8: Calendar interface ...................................................................... 15

Image 9: Administrator Control Panel ......................................................... 16

Image 10: Branches List ........................................................................... 16

Image 11: Branch insertion ....................................................................... 17

Image 12: Branch editing interface ............................................................. 17

Image 13: Assign employees to branch menu .............................................. 18

Image 14: Set branch sub-branches ........................................................... 18

Image 15: Set branch’s job descriptions ...................................................... 18

Image 16: Organization chart .................................................................... 19

Image 17: List of job descriptions............................................................... 19

Image 18: Insertion of a new job description ............................................... 20

Image 19: Editing of job description ........................................................... 20

Image 20: Job description to skills .............................................................. 21

Image 21: Job description to lessons .......................................................... 21

Image 22: Skills list ................................................................................. 22

Image 23: Skill insertion form.................................................................... 22

Image 24: Skill editing.............................................................................. 23

Image 25: Mass skill assignment to employees ............................................ 23

Image 26: Employee list ........................................................................... 24

Image 27: Employee insertion form ............................................................ 25

Image 28: Employee placements’ management ............................................ 26

Image 29: Employee to skills management tab ............................................ 27

Image 30: Employee to skills management tab ............................................ 27

Image 31: Employee to User Groups management ....................................... 28

eFront | Enterprise Version 5

Image 33: Employee searching: employees at “Head department” criterion ...... 29

Image 34: Lessons to skills management .................................................... 29

Image 35: Lessons to skills management .................................................... 31

Image 36: Employee type control panel ...................................................... 33

Image 37: Professor’s menu for adding evaluations to employees ................... 33

Image 38: New message interface in eFront Enterprise™ ............................... 34

eFront | Enterprise Version 6

The HCD component provides a wide range of functionalities from personnel

2. CONCEPTS AND FEATURES

2.1 USERS - EMPLOYEES

eFront | Enterprise Version 7

• If an employee has already a placement at a branch as an employee and is

• On the other hand, if an employee is a supervisor at a branch and then

• If a supervisor is removed from his or her last placement as a supervisor,