Purdue University Enrolls WebFOCUS to Extend Internet Access for Students, Administrators, and Faculty

Snapshot

Organization Purdue University Calumet

Profile Major institution of higher education

Headquarters Hammond, Indiana

The Challenge To support a "commuting campus" by providing Internet access to student, faculty, and administrative information

Results Web-enabled student information applications

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, FOCUS Desktop (WebFOCUS Developer Studio), EDA (Now part of iWay Software's product suite), Cactus (WebFOCUS Maintain)

By now, everybody knows of the great changes the World Wide Web is having on multiple levels of society, from personal e-mail links to worldwide melding of financial institutions. In higher education, in particular, the Internet is rapidly becoming a platform for initiatives such as distance learning, streamlined administration, and teacher-student communication.

One institution of higher education making great strides in these arenas is the Calumet campus of Purdue University. This institution provides undergraduate and graduate education for more than 9,000 students spread across the large Calumet region of northwestern Indiana. Because the university serves such a sizable area, many Illinois students – some from Chicago and the suburbs of Chicago, 40 miles away – have to travel long distances to get to the campus.

Supporting the Commuting Campus

"Anytime we can keep students from physically having to travel to the campus just to access or input information, everybody wins," declares Jennifer Cruse, application integration systems specialist for the school's Computing Technology and Information Services department. "That's the principal reason we're moving with all deliberate speed to modify and Web-enable a number of existing client/server information access and reporting functions."

Purdue Calumet has already moved two student applications to the Web and is working to open up many "access and input paths" into student information for administrators and faculty. "Thanks to WebFOCUS, we can think big in this arena because we can easily move our FOCUS-based client/server applications to the Web," says Cruse. "We can also develop new Web applications using the Cactus application development environment."

WebFOCUS is a server-based reporting environment that all standard Internet browsers can link to. It can run standard reports and parameterized queries, as well as ad hoc requests created by end users. Cactus, a component of WebFOCUS, expands the reporting capability with database update capability and allows developers to create, test, and deploy applications spanning the Internet, IBM Mainframes, midrange servers, LANs, and workstations.

Although the university also uses the BannerWeb product from Sungard Higher Education Corporation for online student information, Cruse finds that this product does not provide ad hoc reporting capabilities – an important capability that many users demand. "Both BannerWeb and WebFOCUS access our Oracle database and are very useful, but WebFOCUS allows us to take existing client/server reports and move them over to the Internet quite easily," she explains.

FOCUS in the Classroom

Purdue Calumet is a major user of Information Builders' products, both as business tools and to aid academic instruction in the school's Information Systems and Computer Programming department. Charles Winer, an associate professor who teaches an applied database design techniques and construction class, gives high marks to FOCUS. "The product is widely distributed throughout the higher education community and the business world, so by training students in its use, I'm giving them a leg up to the real world," he relates. "Students find FOCUS fun to use, so it makes teaching the complexities of database structures a lot easier."

Cruse should know. A former student of Winer's, now responsible for leading the Internet evolution at Purdue Calumet, she has used WebFOCUS to put a Transfer Equivalency Program online, and Cactus to create an application called Web Resume, which allows students and alumni to create and maintain their resumes online. "When we get requests from employers for part-time and full-time positions, we can match these with student skills as they are delineated in their resumes," Cruse explains. "This capability allows students to write and submit their resumes from home, so they do not have to come into the Office of Career Development Placement."

Likewise, students can access the university's Course Equivalency database to find out how courses they have taken at Purdue Calumet will match up with similar courses at other universities, and vice versa. In the past, a potential student would have to go to the Admissions Office to find out how courses transfer among institutions. The student would be given a list of the course equivalencies, which would likely be different by the end of the semester. Now they can get all that information automatically on the Web.

Just the Beginning

Yet even these popular WebFOCUS applications are just the beginning, Cruse explains. "FOCUS is on every desktop in every department at the university," she says. "People are already using FOCUS to get their reports from the client/server network – in Admissions, Financial Aid, Bursar, and Registration. These include template reports, as well as a huge number of ad hoc reports that are generated and maintained on the WebFOCUS server."

Anthony Gunia, financial aid systems specialist, agrees with Cruse. "It would be great if we could get a lot of our financial aid reports that we use for fund management, student scholarships, and so on, out on the Web," he says. "Our administrators could then access these reports from any location."

Cruse insists, however, that every department at the university will soon have a similar plea. "The ease and economy of Web-based information access is irresistible," she says. "We're all excited about Web application development and reporting with WebFOCUS and Cactus."

The university has deployed well over 1,000 PCs that are used by the administration, faculty, and staff. These are connected to Windows NT and Novell servers and two Hewlett-Packard mini-computers, where data is stored in an Oracle database. WebFOCUS and Cactus are installed on Windows NT servers.

Priorities for Web access and reporting, as well as other initiatives, are driven by a six-member Student Information System team, which meets with the various departments for input and draws up a work list. "One of the major projects that we're planning to do with WebFOCUS is to provide standardized reporting capabilities, so that we can get student demographic information to the government," she says. "We'll build an Oracle database for our Research Database Project, then use WebFOCUS, via Information Builders' EDA* middleware, to extract the statistical data."

In point of fact, explains Cruse, the university has more potential use for WebFOCUS than it has time to create WebFOCUS applications. "We have so many applications we'd like to get out on the Web, so many things we can do to support our 'commuting campus,'" she sums up. "And that's where we're heading: to get as much on the Web as possible."

Associate Professor Winer couldn't agree more. "Our distance-learning program is already well under way," he says. "We offered more than 20 courses, mostly in computer information systems, this past semester. WebFOCUS will give us the capability to match our educational initiatives with similar online support for all the multitude of administrative functions."

(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)