Although both versions of the Colleague UI connect to the same database, display the same information, and use the same security setup, each functions a bit differently and they look much different from each other.

Menu Structure

In Colleague UI 5 the menus are displayed on the left-hand side of the screen rather than in the form area as they were in Colleague UI 4.

Colleague UI 5 Menu Structure

Navigating the Hierarchy

Besides Form Search, another way to access forms in Colleague is by Navigating the Hierarchy. You can view a list of the forms you have access to by clicking the ‘Navigate’ button to the right of the search bar and selecting the proper application (HR, ST, CF, etc).

The navigation menu in Colleague UI 5 is similar to navigation in UI 4 but now allows you to quickly assess the applications you have access to at the top level.

Double-clicking on a navigation menu item will load the form into the Form Area.

Calculator Button

The Calculator Button in Colleague UI 5 allows a calculation to be made if the field stores a number. This can be a handy way to make a calculation within the UI rather than

having to access a physical calculator or one provided by your computer operating system.

Lookup Button

The Lookup button indicates that the field allows you to search for a value to be entered using ellipsis ‘…’ as the wildcard character to look up information. Hovering your mouse over the lookup icon will indicate which field is being used for the lookup.

Please Wait … Dialog

One of the most useful new features in Colleague UI 5 is the ‘Please Wait …’ dialog box because it gives end-users insight into Colleague’s processing status.

Some Colleague processes can take a while to generate results due to factors such as running multiple calculations or lookups per record in order to produce a report or update records in batch. These transactions involve large overhead and use of system resources. In previous UI versions it was difficult to tell if the process you initiated got hung up or was still processing in the background after a certain amount of time had passed. This would lead to end-users closing out their browser window to login in again, creating another Colleague session and possibly leaving the previous session open in the background.

To indicate that Colleague is still processing your request, the ‘Please Wait’ dialog will pop up to give an informative message regarding the transaction. For example, this pop up happened during a Person Search for the name ‘smith’:

When you see this dialog box you can leave it up or click ‘Close Dialog’ to close it. If you choose to close it your process will continue to run and results will be displayed after Colleague has finished processing the transaction.