Construction - Complete

Here is the latest slideshow with our construction complete and the furniture is in!

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EWS goes with dotProject

We desperately need a project management software platform for several reasons.

• Show accountability with the resources (staff and budget) that the college and taxpayers have entrusted to us.
• Provide visibility into our projects, ultimately leading to transparency.
• Allow for a more distributed work team through centralized command and control.
  

We have decided to go with dotProject as our project management software platform. dotProject is an open source initiative that is currently on version 2.1.1. This seems to be a stable and widely used application and one that was very easy to install and configure.

One of the nicest features I found was the task logging it provides. Through an easy to use interface, developers can now log activity against a task without a cumbersome process. This data all gets folded into the task and project activity that is easy to track via the built in gantt chart reports. There is also a pretty fair number of reports that can be generated per project.

There is also a trouble ticket system, which we hope to customize and use as our work request form replacement. We would like our customers to log a request and have it go directly into the system and created as a task. Once this is done, everything is automatically tracked and the customer can receive email notifications on the progress.

Update - Late Start Schedule

After a preview of the prototype application, it was determined that I missed a rather large requirement. The student affairs folks not only wanted a current seat count of a section, but they also wanted to know which students were in those seats. In an effort to quickly prototype a solution, I skipped asking solid questions, which lead to three extra days of development.

The application has been completed and is now in user acceptance testing. We are also doing our performance testing during this time.

All in all, everything has turned out quite nicely and we have a very easy to use application to assist during the nsis cutover period.

Emergency Late Start Class Schedule

MCC is cutting over to a new SIS. For the week that the legacy system is offline, we will still need to enroll students. Our student affairs folks will do this via paper, but still need a way to have distributed enrollment with a centralized way of knowing class seat counts, etc.

I have already written a special online late start class schedule that is in use. I proposed to add a few screens to this application that will allow authorized student affairs employees to increment and decrement the seat counts. It looks like we'll be moving forward with prototyping this weekend to have a deliverable by Monday.

Technologies used:
JEE5 (EJB3, JSP) and Struts
Glassfish app server
Eclipse IDE

Happy Hunting!

Welcome

Welcome to the Mesa Community College's Enterprise Web Services (EWS) blog!

The aim of this blog is to describe the projects that we work on and the progress being made on each.