Projects

Active Projects

Physics Account Management System The purpose of this program is to replace the non-Y2K compliant DOS based program currently used to track transaction, encumbrances, and budgets on the over 100 accounts that the Physics staff manage. It is being written in MS Access97 and is currently on schedule to provide account, encumbrance, group, and category entry and tracking by Sept 1, 1999. As of Sept 20, budgeting any account by group or category was also functional. Class Talk (105 Heldenfelds) Class Talk is a student response system from Better Education Inc. The purpose of this project is to implement the system in room 105 Heldenfelds so that it can be used beginning in the spring 1999 semester. Migration of departmental accounting to MS Access (Phase II) This project is basically a total rewrite - from the ground up - of the Phase I system described elsewhere. After implementation, it became obvious that there were several serious structural flaws in the database design; flaws not recognizable until the program was actually used and tested. Among these were the billing methods, and recording of the payments. Job and inventory tracking, which were initially planned for the 2nd phase, became a neccesity more immediately, so the decision was made to begin the rewrite immediately. The Phase II system will be much more encompassing, handling inventory tracking and control, job management, and employee tracking as well as point-of-sale entry and billing. Web Site Development Phase II This project entails further development ofthe departmental web site by addressing navigational issues, hardware/software documentation issues, and any information holes that exist.

Pending Projects

Departmental-wide information management system / Migration of accounting (Phase III) This project will convert the Shops Accounting and Account Management Programs currently under development into one seamless departmental-wide information management system. The system will manage point-of-sale data entry, inventory, recieving and returns, job tracking, billing, employee management, account management, and final reconciliation with FAMIS. We will build from the ground up in MS Access 2000, utilizing the enhancements made to the new Jet Engine 4.0. It is anticipated that a dedicated server with dual or quad PentiumIII Xeon processors and a suficient amount of memory and disk space will be needed for implementation.

Completed Projects

Summer 1998 Migration of Computers This project details how the new servers and workstations will be implemented and how varios services will be migrated off of chaos, silly, fermi, and phys. Migration of departmental accounting to MS Access (Phase I) This project is intended to migrate the departmental shops (electrical, mechanical, and liquefier) accounting procedure from the currently used software and hardware to a unified solution using Microsoft Access and an NT server. Upon completion of this project, information should flow smoothly from the shops through the point-of-sale data entry and into the billing stages without duplication of data entry. This phase will accomplish the initial step of converting from the DOS-based FoxPro and Quickbooks solution to one using Access. From that point further steps can be taken. Electrical and Mechanical Shop Webs This project will concern itself with setting up weblets for the Electronics and Machine Shops for the department.