Read-only role

It is funny how this functionality is always an after-thought. After getting off a call where we were just about finalizing the design and getting ready for the sign-off this issue came up. I don't know how many times this issue has been raised at the last moment.
Why this is a tiny bit important is because it, more often than not, does have a *very* significant impact on user the time and effort needed to deliver the project. And then, there are always the hacks that we as developers/designers come up with "Oh...for now, lets just have hidden or disable action buttons" sort of a solution.
An elegant solution, as we all know is to present a read-only view (a separate page) of only the specific information that a read only user might be interested in and not build a read only view of every form within the application. Although, I am not sure if this is something that the plethora of application frameworks out there can provide as a feature. But, creating this view does require some thought and some user interactions ot figure out what might be the right set of things.

So there you go, an interesting situation that we in the technology field face often times.

Anyways, instead of planning to blog, I have decided to experiment and create entries in here as soon as a thought hits my head. Of course, this means, these entries have to be short, otherwise I would probably end up blogging all day about all sorts of things.