Application Development

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I attended CBORD Odyssey PCS training in Rochester, NY. FYI...PCS stands for priviledge control system and keeps track of the student card transactions. We learned about the new features coming out in version 4.1, such as CSV imports and a new way to schedule reports to be sent via email. They covered the abilities of the system to process complex dining transactions and plans.

MaintenanceDirect™ Online Work Order Management System has been purchased for Facilities Management. The first training session for Jay, Steve, and Loreen, is scheduled for July 3rd at 9 a.m. in Main 12.

"MaintenanceDirect is a powerful, on-demand work management tool that helps you streamline the entire work order process from request to completion." This subscription based software is hosted off campus and will replace the FixIt MS Access database that is currently in use. Jay plans to be using Maintenance Direct to manage work requests by August.

www.schooldude.com

Today the conversion account used for Colleague Advancement was copied over to a test account for review by End-Users in Alumni and Development. This marks a significant milestone in the project as this will allow our users to see Luther specific data in the new environment for the very first time. Cindy Goede, Chris Frana, and I will continue to review reports that were produced during this process of setup errors and conversion errors. We will work to resolve these errors in preparation for additional test conversion.

Greg Vanney and I attended three days of training in Fairfax, VA for Advanced ActiveCampus CMS June 10-12. The training covered a number of topics including: creating new content types, creating and modifying .css and .xslts for new content types, user submitted content and its applications, enabaling JavaScripts on AC pages, Email Management,and much, much more. The final day was reserved for a hands-on workshop. The training, though light on documentation, was informative and worthwhile.

Summary of the project and work request time recorded in TrackIt for the Application Development team by business unit for academic year 2007-08 (June 1, 2007-May 31, 2008)

Jay, Loreen, and Steve from Facilities visited Kirkwood College to talk to them about their implementation of SchoolDude, a work order system that they had looked at with us back in 2006. Kirkwood is using all of the SchoolDude products; Maintenance Direct, PM Direct, Inventory Direct, and Utilities Direct. They received had very positive feedback from Kirkwood on the software and their experience working with the SchoolDude company. I've scheduled a product review of the Maintenance Direct and PM Direct products for the Facilities group and Diane Tacke on June 5th from 2-3 p.m.

On Friday, April 18, 2008 the new Academic Planning Committee (APC) application was launched. The APC application has been improved to include the suggestions from the faculty feedback that LIS received from the original application. The database, menu, and screens have been simplified for easier use. Users have the ability to see the proposals that you have created and easily sort and select courses that you wish to review. APC administrators have the ability to move the proposals through the approval process, recording user editing and dates of the most recent changes.

New Dates for Moving Alumni to NorseMail

We've modified the dates to start communication to Alumni on June 30th so that the HelpDesk is staffed to help respond to Alumni with questions.

Here's the new plan for moving existing Alumni to NorseMail.

1) Scott will modify the Alumni directory application to include an option under Settings, to create a new NorseMail account. Scott will add instruction for them to recreate email forwarding accounts in NorseMail. The current email forwarding option will not display for those Alumni using NorseApps.

We have changed out the server that runs CBORD Odyssey. At this point the system is back up with some minor issues. The server seems to work twice as fast. Dining Services should be back online completely. PCS and HMS clients on the PC should work. PCS users will get an error message at startup, but if they click OK, the program will run. The housing student registration site is not working, we are following up with CBORD to get this resolved asap.

Report from the Datatel Users Group conference held March 8-12, 2008 in Washington, D.C.

I attended a number of sessions that provided valuable information that we can put to use in the next year.

* Performance tuning – I attended several tuning sessions covering Datatel Colleague Release 18 (R18), Web Advisor, DMI listeners (used in R18) and web load performance testing. I gathered lots of information that should help us understand more about the database administration functions that need to occur on the Datatel and Web Advisor servers to help improve performance.