Welcome to the Merkle's Employees Award System! We hope that this system will be able to assist you and your employees in creating a successful growing organization with the best and happiest employees. 

Note: This is just Prototype 1. There is no database integration and the data provided are just dummy data. Please bear with us. You will see a more advanced EA system in our up and coming Prototype 2.


Installation Instructions:
1. Please extract the three files/folders (images, db and JAR file) from the EA zipped file and save them together into a folder.
2. Run the EA system by double-clicking on the EA.JAR file.
3. Enjoy!


User Manual:
1. The EA system begins with the Welcome which offers users a selection of options. For the pilot phase, the tool starts off with 2 features: 1) Nominate Employees, and 2) Vote for Winners. The Nominate Employees feature allows all levels of employees to access and requires no user authentication at this point.

2. To begin with, the employees may just need to select and click on the Nominate Employees icon button or the text link. The Vote for Winners feature is only for selected employees who chairs the role as voters. User authentication is required. Similarly, to vote, the employee may just need to select and click on the Vote for Winners icon button or the text link.

3. All voters can access the "Vote for Winners" page with their specific username and password. For prototype 2, all users have been given access with a default password of password. The user name is the first letter of the first name plus the last name. Since Nino is an employee at Merkle we can use his user name and password for this test. Please note that the user identification and password authentication are case sensitive. If the user forgets their password they can use the forgot password link which will redirect them to the Merkle website.

			Username: najami
			Password: password

4. The Nominate Employees page allows all employees to nominate any outstanding employees for any available and relevant awards. For each selected award, there will be subsequent description at the "Award Description" text area.

5. Once the user has identified the award for nomination, the user can then select nominees from the list of employees from the Nominee comboBox. The user will be required to fill in the Comments textArea and state the rationale for nominating this person. 

6. Once completed, the employee(s) can process the submission by clicking on the "Submit" button. Alternately, user may click the Cancel button to cancel the submission and return to the Welcome

7. From the Welcome, the user will be redirected to the Log-in page, if he/she selects Vote for Winners from the previous Welcome to vote for the nominations. Please use the log-in name and password provided in step 3 to access the "Vote for Winners" page. The "Forgot you log-in or password link and the "Remember" checkbox is currently not working. Please stay tuned for the next prototype.

8. In the "Vote for Winners" page, similarly, for every selected award, the text description of the award will be shown in the non-editable Award Description text area. Every time a different award is selected the list of nominated employees change. Below the JTable, there is a drop down that shows current nominees for an award. 

9. Finally, after reviewing the entries, the user (voter) may select his/her vote by selecting the desired employee from the My Vote comboBox. The similar list of employees nominated for the specific award will be listed in the My Vote comboBox. All fields are required before submitting an entry. 

10. User may click on the Submit button to submit entry. Alternately, user may click the Cancel button to cancel the submission and return to the Switchboard. The user may log-out from the EA System by clicking the Log-out button.

Thank you for using the EA system!


Project Team:
Diana Wong		dwong@umd.edu
Michiko Chand		michiko@umd.edu
Nazih Ajami		najami@umd.edu
