We are going through a process of selecting a 3rd party suite of controls for Silverlight 4.0. We're mostly interested in a feature-rich grid control. I'm surprised to find that most of the products out there focus on client side paging, filtering, sorting, and grouping. But if the dataset is large enough to benefit from these functions isn't also too big to bring to the client in one call? And doesn't this make most of the advertised fancy grid features useless? In my opinion 200 rows of data is ideal upper limit on how much I'd request from the server in one request. Yet the sites for Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, Xceed, and others all have fancy demos that bring 10,000+ rows of data to the client and show off the ability to page, filter, group, and sort it. Who brings 10,000+ rows of data to the client? What if you have 1,000s of concurrent users? What if that data is volatile? What use-case does this really address?
Can you share your experiences with any of these control suites and whether you've implemented paging? Also whether you are using RIA?
Thanks.
You don't need a third party Grid control to achieve server side paging. You can use the grid control and ObjectDataSource provided by silverlight toolkit http://silverlight.codeplex.com/
http://borrell.parivedasolutions.com/2008/01/objectdatasource-linq-paging-sorting.html
I agree with you, it can be crazy for a client to want to view their entire years worth of data all at the same time, but sometimes the client (and product managers) don't see things the same way you do and insist upon doing stupid things....
In any case, just because the demo is paging through 1 million records that doesn't mean they are bringing them all to the client. You also have to consider the scenario where you have 200 rows worth of data but you can only show 10 rows at a time due to the data templates you are using (you may only fit 10 rows to a page) - you can still retrieve all 200 rows because it is simply your presentation that is using up the physical room. You can also implement paging and retrieve the next page worth of data when it is requested (which will introduce a small delay, but could be well worth it). Possibly the best way to deal with this is to not give the user the ability to retrieve squillions of records at once - if you give them that feature they will use it and then they will also complain about its performance.
As for fast client side sorting/grouping/filtering, that is a real world necessity. It is common for our users to fetch many thousands of records from the server, then use the filters (which i have extended) to view a handful of records at a time, operate on those records, then modify the filters to view a different bunch. It is important to have these functions working fast because it makes a huge difference to the user experience. I trialled several different component sets earlier this year and found there was a vast difference in the performance between them when it came to these functions, so choose wisely :)
I'd like to see a control suite that boast working with concurrency issues on order fullfullment and also uses queues or stacks in order to solve data conflicts. I see too often that this grids and list controls are really nice, pretty, and show you all the data, but they don't solve basic concurreny problems when you have more than one person working on the same set of data. If it automates the locking of a row of one user from another, prevents duplication of work, and automatically logs error messages, then I can see purchasing the control suite.
You don't need to load all your data at once you can specify a maximum load in the xaml of your ObjectDataSource. This will load your data in blocks of the specified size.
Take a look at the 2 RIA services videos here:
https://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices/
There are segments on paging which may also be useful to you.
note(some of the assembly references and syntax have changed slightly since these videos were made but the core function is still the same)
Related
I have been tasked with coming up with a high performance front-end for a live ActivePivot back-end. I already have a client-side service layer that provides a continuous stream (IObservable<T>) of pre-aggregated, pre-formatted data, as well as metadata detailing the dimensions and what-not in the report. My requirements can be summarized as:
Dynamically set up row and column headers based on metadata in the stream.
Dynamically pass live data through to the appropriate row/column of the control.
Highlight changes to data. eg. increased values may highlight temporarily in green, decreased values in red.
Intercept user actions on row/column headers (ie. drill-downs) so that I can instigate a change in the underlying MDX query.
Intercept user actions (probably double-click) on data values so that I can instigate a drill-through query (the results of which would be displayed in a separate data grid).
All the third party components appear to be geared around slicing and dicing disconnected (or rarely updated) data sets. They sacrifice performance to achieve a higher degree of flexibility that I simply don't need, and performance is paramount for my scenario.
Does anyone know of a WPF control that is performance-focussed and geared more towards the viewing of pre-aggregated, pre-formatted data?
PivotTable-like frontends that allow slice and dice data exploration are in general associated with OLAP technology. Some of those frontends target one specific server, using a proprietary data model, and some others implement the standard: MDX queries over XMLA transport.
But when OLAP technology was designed 20 years ago, doing it in real-time seemed unthinkable. One consequence is that the XMLA standard has no support for updates in a cell set. Actually it practically forbids it because of the static representation of cell sets and cell set axis.
ActivePivot can push real-time updates into an OLAP result set and it exposes a (proprietary) streaming API to subscribe to those updates. The ActivePivot Live frontend was in the first place written to leverage those real-time updates, presenting them in familiar pivot table controls. But in 2013 ActivePivot is still the only OLAP server with real-time support. That explains why there isn't yet a standard to subscribe to OLAP real-time updates. And that also means that as of 2013 and outside of ActivePivot Live you will not find a toolkit (WPF or not) that has done the whole job of enriching its pivot table controls with real-time updates. The libraries we know of have actually transposed the static data representation of XMLA in their pivot table designs, making it cumbersome or impossible to update the cells (think of the Microsoft Excel Pivot Table for instance).
Under the constraint of a particular technology like WPF, I would select a general purpose UI toolkit, that makes it easy to arrange and compose tables. From there that's a D.I.Y. job.
Just in case anyone was wondering, I ended up writing my own WPF PivotGrid control specifically designed for high performance. It handles tens of millions of cells with hundreds of thousands of updates per second. Why anyone would want that much data in a single grid I don't know, but there you go.
It handles all the requirements I lay out in my question, and more. Can't share any more than this, however, as it's proprietary.
I have a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 app that pulls data from a public API. I find myself doing much of the same thing over and over again:
In the UI, set a loading message or loading progress bar in place of where the content is
Get the content, which may be already in memory, cached in isolated file storage, or require an HTTP request
If the content can not be acquired (no network connection, etc), display an error message
If the content is acquired, display it in the UI
Keep the content in main memory for subsequent queries
The content that is displayed to the user can be taken directly from a data source, such as an ObservableCollection, or it may be a query on a data source.
I would like to factor out this repetitive process into a framework where ideally only the following needs to be specified:
Where to display the content in the UI
The UI elements to show while loading, on failure, and on success
The URI of the HTTP request
How to parse the HTTP response into the data structure that will kept in memory
The location of the file in isolated storage, if it exists
How to parse the file contents into the data structure that will be kept in memory
It may sound like a lot, but two strings, three FrameworkElements, and two methods is less than the overhead that I currently have.
Also, this needs to work for however the data is maintained in memory, and needs to work for direct collections and queries on those collections.
My questions are:
Has something like this already been implemented?
Are my thoughts about the topic above fundamentally wrong in some way?
Here is a design I'm thinking of:
There are two components, a View and a Model.
The View is given the FrameworkElements for loading, failure, and success. It is also given a reference to the corresponding Model. The View is a UserControl that is placed somewhere in the UI.
The Model a class that is given the URI for the data, a method of how to parse the data, and optionally a filename and how to parse the file. It is responsible for retrieving the data and notifying the View whenever the current status (loading/fail/success) changes. If the data downloaded from the network is different from the cache, the network data takes precedence. When the app closes or is tombstoned, the model writes the data to the cache.
How does that sound?
I took some time to have a good read of your requirements and noted some thoughts to offer as a sounding board.
Firstly, for repetetive tasks with common behaviour this is definitely the way to approach it. You are not alone in thinking about this problem.
People doing a bunch of this sort of thing may have created similar abstractions however, to my knowledge none have been publicly released.
How far you go with it may depend if you intend it to be just for your own use and for those with very similar requirements or whether you want to handle more general cases and make a product that is usable by a very wide audience.
I'm going to assume the former, but that does not preclude the possibility of releasing it as an open source project that can be developed further and/or forked.
By not trying to cater for all possibilities you can make certain assumptions about the nature of the using implementation and in particular UI design choices.
I think overall your thinking in the right direction. While reading some of your high level thoughts I considered some things could be simplified (a good thing) and at the same time delivering a compeling UI.
On your initial points.
You could just assume a performance isindeterminate progressbar is being passed in.
Do this if it's important to you, but you could be buying yourself into some complexity here handling different caching requirements - variance in duration or dirty handling. Perhaps sufficient to lean on the platforms inbuilt caching of urls (which some people have found gets in their way).
Handle network connectivity, yep this is repetitive and somewhat intricate. A perfect candidate for a general solution.
Update UI... arguably better to just return data and defer decisions regarding presentation and format of data to your individual clients.
Content in main memory - see above on caching.
On your potential inputs.
Where to display content - see above re data and defer presentation choices to client.
I would go with a UI element for the progress indicator, again a performant progress bar. Regarding communication of failure I would consider implementing this in a Completed event which you publish. Then through parameters you can communicate the result and defer handling to the client to place that result in some presentation control/log/whatever. This is consistent with patterns used by the .Net Framework.
URI - yes, this gets passed in.
How to parse - passing in a delegate to convert a stream or string into an object whose type can be decided by the client makes sense.
Loc of cache - you could pass this if generalising this matters, or hardcode it's path. It would be more useful to others if passed in (consider if you handle folders/creation).
On the implementation.
You could go with a UserControl, if it works for you to be bound by that assumption. It would be more flexible though, and arguably equally simple/elegant, to push presentation back on the client for both the data display and status messages and control hide/display of the progress bar as passed in.
Perhaps you would go so far as to assume the status messages would always be displayed in a textblock (if passed) and shift that housekeeping from each of your clients into your generic class.
I suspect you will benefit from not coupling the data format and presentation still.
Tombstone handling.. I would recommend some testing on the platforms in built caching of URLs here and see if you can identify whether it's durations/dirty conditions work for your general cases.
Hopefully this gives you some things to think about and some reassurance you're heading down the right path. There are many ways you could go about this. Which is the best path ultimately will be driven by your goals.
I'm developing a WP7 application which is basically a client of an existing REST API. The server returns data in JSON. With the help of the library JSON.NET (http://json.codeplex.com/) I was able to deserialize it directly to my .NET C# classes.
I store locally the data to handle offline scenario of my application and also to prevent the call on the server each time the user launch the application. I provide two ways to refresh the data: manually and/or after a period of time. To store the data I use Sertling (http://sterling.codeplex.com/), it’s a simple but easy to use local database for Silverlight/WP7.
The biggest challenge is to handle the asynchronous communication with the server. I provide clear UI feedbacks (Progressbar and /or loading wheel) to let know to the user what’s going on.
On a side note I’m using MVVM Light toolkit and SL Unit Testing to do integration test View Model => my local Client code => Server. (http://code.google.com/p/nunit-silverlight/wiki/NunitTestsWp7)
People seem to avoid building user interfaces that pull their information (names, field types, etc. as well as relationships) from a database; they instead hard-code forms (and tables, etc.) that have pretty much the same data names and types and things.
Am I making sense?
For instance, imagine an emumerated field in MySQL: why not just have the UI construct a drop-down list whenever it encounters an ENUM? Why put the same values in both the database and the code?
Perhaps I'm just missing something; perhaps there are projects out there that do this — sort of super-crud interfaces that can be pointed at any database and from it build a fully-functional relationally-aware user interface. Are there?
I'm possibly not quite conforming to the stackoverflow norms with this question; I shall summarise:
Can you please tell me of a project that constructs its user interface (solely) from analysis of the database schema?
Why is this not a common way to do it — surely it is good to only define data structure in one place (i.e. the database)?
Thank you, and may joyous code-love rain upon your IDE.
I'd like to point out that, last time I checked, .NET and Qt (and probably other environments) make it possible to use "database-aware widgets" (sometimes shortened to just data-aware widgets), which is probably the best pragmatic solution available. What I mean by data-aware widgets is that the widgets themselves know that they're linked directly to database fields, so you would have a combobox that knows that it's backed by an enum and fetches the possible values directly from the database at runtime, just like you suggested.
This is a really neat utility, and used well, it probably won't hurt anything. It still requires that you spend some time laying out widgets manually on a form, but then if you update the database to add a new value to that enum, you don't have to rebuild your app to see it show up in the UI.
But the reason most usability experts will cringe when they hear your question is because programmers tend to think that, well, why not just generate the entire UI, form layout and everything, from the database? And this is where it starts to get really nasty, really fast.
Let's say you have a simple Person table, with first_name, last_name, email_address, street_address, city, state, zip, and phone_number. You want to automatically generate a UI based on these fields. How do you sort the fields? I mean, ideally, first name and last name should be right next to one another. And it would look very silly if you had city and state before street address. So you have to add a new column to the table to specify sort order, if you go with the quickest method, or a new table to specify each field's order index to their field ID.
What if you want to group parts of the information separately? Then you have to add more UI-specific cruft into your database layout (to do this generically, you'll need a new table specifying which UI fields belong to which UI groupboxes). So you've only solved two problems and already your database layout has gotten twice as ugly, plus now instead of a simple O(1) layout operation when you load the UI, you've gotta do several database queries to find out what fields exist and dynamically lay them out while applying the correct widget order... and we haven't even dealt with sizing (should every field be the maximum size to fit its possible contents, or should all text fields be the same width? Wouldn't it be nice if you could say that some text fields should be one width and height, and some should be another combination? etc), or text justification, or formatting, or any other really common elementary usability requirements that will require further sacrifices from the clarity and simplicity of your database schema.
Most visual database editors. phpMyAdmin for instance.
Because the database structure isn't always a very good logical structure for a user to be using, especially in the case of databases that have been denormalised on purpose for efficiency reasons.
Yup, this route has already been traveled.
Simply pointing at a database will create an oversimplified UI, not giving much more than the CRUD of an Access UI. That's why Naked Objects (I'm one of its committers) builds its metamodel from a pojo domain model. This allows the UI to expose any public methods as menus ... we call this "behaviourally complete".
Per the comment about the UI not being suitable for end-users, I have two points:
distinguish between power users vs casual users. Most internal apps are for the former (we use Alan Coopers' term of a "sovereign application" for this), who understand the domain and don't want fancy UI stuff getting in the way. Most external apps, eg public web sites, are for the latter.
for the latter, there's nothing to prevent the autogenerated UI of a tool like Naked Objects being replaced with a custom or semi-customized viewer. One such viewer is Scimpi, I'm also working on an Eclipse RCP viewer that'll expose extension points. But even here, the auto gen UI is still very valuable for the development team and business analysts for exploration and prototyping.
Hope some of the above has piqued your interest. If you want more, google around, or you might want to check out my book on domain-driven design and NO, at pragprag.com.
HTH
Dan
List of projects that implement this idea.
.NET
dotObjects
Naked Objects
TrueView
Java
Domain Object Explorer
JMatter
Naked Objects
Sanssouci
Trails
Lablz
C++
Typical Objects
Specifically to your second question: Alot of it really depends on your data model. Some are very complicated and would lead to un-intuitive user interfaces. Perhaps for simply CRUD based systems, having your UI be a front end to the database would be preferable. In that case, I think that some of these tools would be great. However, for some more complicated systems where some db data needs to be hidden from the users, it would be better if you UI didn't mirror the db schema.
Microsoft Access has used this model for years - the database and UI development are very closely tied. You can auto-generate a form directly from a table definition with smart defaults and search built in. The model works well for developing applications with few concurrent users such as custom applications for small businesses where the amount of data stored is small.
If you are scaling to larger relational DBs with a number of concurrent users, or large databases then reliability and performance become more important, and separately constructed UI and databases make more sense. When more users are involved they often have different requirements so decoupling the UI from the DB schema makes it more efficient to develop.
Just a note on Java "projects that implement this idea" - tynamo is the new version of Trails framework
There are many systems that build an interface for you to edit stuff directly from table information. End-user interfaces, however, must be tweaked a little bit. You may not want to reveal to the user every field in your table.
Frameworks that make good use of the MVC design pattern can let you do all kinds of things with your models, which are the preferred way to build new systems (rather than creating database tables directly).
To answer your questions specifically:
django allows you to construct forms (and a complete admin CMS) out of models.
It is a common thing to do.
Naked Objects is about one step removed from this. They base the UI on an object model, and then persist the object model.
I think you are forgetting to consider the user in your design process if you are thinking like that. Bad mistake. Users don't like it when the interface changes, they would especially not like it if it changed frequently as they then wouldn't know what to do. Further, if you generate your UI on the fly based on the database structure, then what order would the objects be in? UIs need to have objects in an order that makes sense to the users not the database designers.
Further in a well-designed database there are fields that are not meant for the users to see. Things like numeric keys, insert date, last updated etc. You don't want to automatically expose these to the users and you certainly don't want them to have the ability to mess with the data in such fields.
Finally, if you don't think about the functionality of the page, then you aren't doing your job. A UI needs to be more than just a list of fileds that can be edited. You need to have constraints on who can see what, checks of the data before inserting to the database, business rules that need to be applied. You can't just autogenerate a lot of this (and you shouldn't even if you could!). Design needs thought and care.
Now as to drop down lists, of course you can generate them from the database and not the code, in fact it is the better choice. Just make the query the source for your particular object, not a list generated in code.
You can do it with the help of this cool tool from a developer in Philippines, it is called COBALT. You can download it here.
How does the waiting time for SmartClient scale across thousands of users editing grids?
I have received warnings before that ExtJS would not be suitable.
SmartClient has a single grid component that does both horizontal and vertical incremental rendering, so it handles a very very large number of both rows (several million) and columns (several hundred) without degradation in performance.
All of the grid features supported by SmartClient - inline editing, grouping, filtering, dynamic frozen columns, sorting, reordering fields, drag and drop .. (too long to list) are supported by this single, high data volume grid component.
A number of users have run into scalability issues with the Ext grid component and discussed it here on the SmartClient forums:
http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?t=2678
As far as scalability of the server, in reality the grid component contributes hugely to server-side scalability. Consider the adaptive filtering mechanism of the SmartClient grid:
http://www.smartclient.com/index.jsp#adaptiveFilter
This feature and the related "Adaptive Sort" feature cut down on 60-90% of the most expensive types of server hits (that is, those that access and filter/sort a large dataset).
SmartClient pervasively takes this approach of intelligently re-using data in order to avoid expensive server-side operations. A good overview is available in the ResultSet class documentation; the ResultSet is used as a cache management object by all components that work with datasets in SmartClient:
http://www.smartclient.com/docs/9.0/a/b/c/go.html#class..ResultSet
The number of users editing grids is not really relevant -- that's more of a question of how your application is designed to support load. If you are asking about performance relative to the grid component itself, the most relevant questions are about the grid's capabilities and how much data it can handle, not how many users will be using it over time.
I'm not familiar with SmartClient, but in the case of Ext, the grid performs very well for small to medium sized grid data (very approximately, up to ~50 rows per page, up to ~10 columns of data). Obviously this all depends on a lot of variables, but it is true that Ext's grid rendering time increases in direct proportion to the amount of data rendered at one time. This is because it uses a fairly heavy DOM under the covers, the trade-off being the rich feature set out of the box and the flexibility that is provided for creating customized nested row layouts. It does support paging to mitigate performance issues, and there is also a very popular extension that provides on-demand row loading (virtual scrolling) that enables higher-performance loading of large data sets. There's also an example of a lighter-weight and simpler version of buffered loading in the Ext examples that shows excellent performance with a lot of data.
Also, depending on your needs, there is a new lightweight ListView component in 3.0. It does not support all of the GridView's features, but if you primarily need a display-only grid, it might be a great alternative.
All of this is not to say that SmartClient is not good -- I have no idea. I just want anyone looking at this thread to have an informed decision on the Ext side of the equation since it sounds like you have received one-sided opinions on it.
thank you for your answer. I have been under the impression that the average-Joe entering a website with Ext would be discouraged when he was faced with a long loading time which was also increased if there were many people using the site.
This was the reason why I thought that SmartClient would be better but I haven't found any comparison between them. Maybe I was to hasty in disregarding ExtJS.
I will hope to get in contact with someone that has had experience from SmartClient to assist in developing my future site.
Thank you
Jez
The form that currently loads during when our beta WinForm application starts up is one that shows a vast array of buttons... "Inventory", "Customers", "Reports", etc. Nothing too exciting.
I usually begin UI by looking at similar software products to see how they get done, but as this is a corporate application, I really can't go downloading other corporate applications.
I'd love to give this form a bit of polish but I'm not really sure where to start. Any suggestions?
EDIT: I am trying to come up with multiple options to present to users, however, I'm drawing blanks as well. I can find a ton of design ideas for the web, but there really doesn't seem to be much for Windows form design.
I have found that given no option, users will have a hard time to say what they want. Once given an option, it's usually easier for them to find things to change. I would suggest making some paper sketches of potential user interfaces for you application. Then sit down with a few users and discuss around them. I would imagine that you would get more concrete ideas from the users that way.
Update
Just a couple of thoughts that may (or may not) help you get forward:
Don't get too hung up on the application being "corporate". Many coprorate applications that I have seen look so boring that I feel sorry for the users that need to see them for a good share of their day.
Look at your own favourite UI's and ask yourself why you like them.
While not getting stuck in the "corporate template", also do not get too creative; the users collected experience comes from other applications and it may be good if they can guess how things work without training.
Don't forget to take in inspiration from web sites that you find appealing and easy to use.
Try to find a logical "flow"; visualize things having the same conceptual functionality in a consistent way; this also helps the user do successful "guesswork".
You might look to other applications that your users are familiar with. Outlook is ubiquitous in my company, and we were able to map our application to its interface relatively easily, so we used that application as a model when developing our UI.
Note that I'm not suggesting Outlook specifically to you, just that you look for UIs that would make your users' learning curve shallower.
The problem here is that you need some good user analysis and I'm guessing you've only done functional analysis.
Because your problem is so abstract, it's hard to give one good example of what you need to do. I'd go to usability.gov and check out the usability methods link, especially card sorting and contextual interviews.
Basically you want to do two things:
1- Discover where your users think how information is grouped on the page: This will help flesh out your functional requirements too. Once you've got information all grouped up, you've basically got your navigation metaphor set up. Also, you can continually do card sorting exercises right down to page and function levels - e.g. you do one card sorting session to understand user needs, then you take one group of cards and ask users to break that down into ranks of importance. Doing so will help you understand what needs to be in dominate areas of the screen and what can be hidden.
2- Understand what tools they already use: what they do and don't like about them. You need to get a list of tools/applications that they use externally and internally. Internally is probably the most important because there is a fair chance that most people in your business will share an experience of using it. External tools however might help give you context into how your users think.
Also, don't be afraid to get pencil and paper and sketch up ideas with users. People generally understand that sketches are a quick and useful way to help with early design work and you can get an immense amount of information out of them with just simple sketches. Yes, even do this if you suck at sketching - chances are it won't matter. In fact, crappy sketches could even work in your favour because then nobody is going to argue if buttons should be blue, red or whatever.
Frankly, a form with a “vast array of buttons” needs more than a little polish. A form dedicated solely to navigation generally means you’re giving your users unnecessary work. Provide a pulldown or sidebar menu on each form for navigating to any form.
The work area of your starting form should provide users with something to actually accomplish their tasks. Among the options are:
A “dashboard” main form, showing summarized information about the users’ work (e.g., list of accounts to review and status of each, number of orders at each stage of processing, To Do schedule). Ideally, users should be able to perform their most common tasks directly in the opening form (e.g., mark each account as “approved” or not). If further information is necessary to complete a task, links navigate to detailed forms filled with the proper query results. At the very least users should be able to assess the status of their work without going any further. Note that different groups of users may need different things on their respective dashboards.
Default form or forms. Users of a corporate application typically have specific assignments, often involving only one to three of all your forms. Users who work with Inventory, for example, may almost never need to look at Customer records, and vice versa. Users also often work on a specific subset of records. Each sales rep, for example may be assigned a small portion of the total number of customers in the database. Divide your users into groups based on the forms and records they usually use. For each user group, start the app by automatically opening the user group’s form(s) populated with the query results of their records. Users should be able to complete most of their work without any further navigation or querying.
If all else fails, open the app to whatever forms and content were last open when the user quit the app. Many corporate users will continue to work tomorrow on the same or similar stuff they’re working on today.
Analyze the tasks of your users to determine which of the above options to use. It is generally not productive to describe each option to the users and ask which they like better.
BTW, “Reports” is probably not a particularly good navigation option. It’s better if you consistently identify things primarily by what they show, rather than how they show it. Users may not know that the information they want to see is in a “report” rather than a form, but they’ll know what content they want to see. Reports on inventory are accessed under Inventory; reports about sales are accessed under Sales.
Have you tried asking your end users what they would like? After all they are the ones that are going to be using the system.
I use components from the company DevExpress. They have some really cool controls (such as the Office 2007 ribbon), form skinning utilities (with a vast amount of different skins), and a load more...
If you want to check it out they have 60 free components - if its corporate though you might have to check the licence but you can get it at... DevExpress 60 Free
I suggest starting with the design principles suggested by Microsoft: Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
Some places to get ideas for interaction designs:
Books
About Face 3 - The Essentials of Interaction Design
Don't Make Me Think (this is focused on web design, but many of the principles carry over to Windows design)
Web Sites
Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
In addition, many applications have free trial versions that you can download to determine how they handle user interaction. Also, don't discount items on your desktop right now.
Do you have any statistics or insights concerning what the most commonly-used or important functions might be? If so, you could use that to pare down your "vast array of buttons" and highlight only those that are most important.
That's sort of a trivial example, but the underlying point is that your understanding of your audience should inform your design, at least from a functional perspective. You might have past usage statistics, or user stories, or documented workflows, or whatever - even if you're drawing a blank right now, remember that you have to know something about your users, otherwise you wouldn't be able to write software for them.
Building on what they already know can make it easy on your users. Do they live in Outlook? Then you might want to mimic that (as Michael Petrotta suggested). Do they typically do the same thing (within a given role) every time they use the app? Then look for a simple, streamlined interface. Are they power users? Then they'll likely want to be able to tweak and customize the interface. Maybe you even have different menu forms for different user roles.
At this stage, I wouldn't worry about getting it right; just relax and put something out there. It almost doesn't matter what you design, because if you have engaged users and you give them the option, they're going to want to change something (everything?) anyway. ;-)