Homegrown Office Management and Payroll Applications Brad Edmondson Senior Student Supervisor Tufts OnLine, UIT, Tufts University
Tufts University 5000 Undergrads 1000 Grad students 3300 Total residents
Technology Services at Tufts Tufts University University IT Tufts OnLine IT Services Systems
Tufts OnLine Functions: –Provide student desktop support –Manage all UIT student contact –Manage itself –Budget: small
Tufts OnLine Staff 1 full-time Supervisor 1 Student Supervisor or Senior Student Technician 2 Student Technicians 1 Student Secretary 25 Total
Challenges Busy students Student employees: coursework vs. our work Small budget Complicated, changing schedules for all involved
Available Resources Lots of computing power Plentiful bandwidth Student employees Open-source and free software
Tufts OnLine Student Website How-to's and troubleshooting docs Software downloads Console MAC registrations Conference MAC registrations Already running on a VM –VMWare host has RAID 1
Result: Tufts OnLine Portal v1-2 Scheduling Hours recording Punch clock Contact info Drop-shift s
Tufts OnLine Portal: v3 Same features AJAX user interface Tough to administer Firefox only Available to all UIT groups Permanent and dynamic schedule model
Tufts OnLine Portal: v3: PII → VM Old PII machine HD fails Late-night data recovery and VM setup Results: Website in one VM, portal site in another p.s. - always RAID your mission-critical systems
Frameworked –Ruby On Rails –Model-View-Control New problems, new opportunities –Students learning Ruby, Rails –More and faster coding thereafter Currently pre-alpha –Source access available on request –Will be released open-source when ready Tufts OnLine Portal: v4 (payrails)
Coming features: –Administrative notifications, statistics –Students ed for open shifts, 18-hour punch-ins –Internal help, documentation, configuration –Pay rates –User-editable contact info –Collision detection Tufts OnLine Portal: v4 (payrails)
Coming features: –Administrative announcements –Massive punch-in/out –Block out holidays –Accounts for everyone Authentication, select actions by group Software downloads, device registrations –Organization editor
Development Patterns Students have limited development time Frameworks make efficient use of time LAMPRuby on Rails Time
Tufts OnLine Portal: v5 (payrails 2) Possible features: –Installation instructions –Student worker seniority –Automatically build schedule –Students choose their own shifts –Repeat offender tracking for missed shifts –Track/alert total $$ earned per student –Arbitrary day start/end time
Contact Information See also: ConPortal, developed at Pomona, enhanced at Bucknell Contact: Tufts OnLine: Php app (v3): RoR app (v4): for svn access (still under heavy