IT continues to innovate university website

26th February | No Comments | posted by vegger | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

If you thought that innovation was over for the university website when IT launched the revamped version in August 2012, think again.

Changes are in the works that will simplify the user’s online experience and make the website a more effective tool.

The biggest change, according to Nate Tucker, Director of IT Systems, is the approach to web development.

Instead of having two separate webpages – one old, and one with all of the new changes – the development transition will be more fluid.

“We’re creating more of an evolving website instead of taking a stop-and-go approach,” Tucker said.

Click here to see the current developing website.

One important difference users should expect to see that will help them connect and interact with the website is the incorporation of RSS feeds from the university calendar and news updates page.

“You’ll be able to get the RSS feeds on your personal calendar or on your mobile phone if you want,” Tucker said.

Another user-friendly update is the conversion of the calendar from a list form into a visual of an actual calendar.

The most recent change, however, involves elements Tucker refers to as banners and real estate, both of which have different meanings in the web design world than they do in other areas of life.

Online banners don’t wave in the wind like their cloth counterparts do, and Lee’s online banners are no different.

The banners on Lee’s website are text and graphic combos that highlight, and may provide links to, other areas of the site that users are likely to find interesting or to want more information about, such as the Frontline program or Lee Day.

Lee’s banners are currently located in a stationary line towards the bottom of the homepage above the “quicklinks” section.  The banners do not appear when users click on links to other pages of the website.

But with this next development, the banners will rotate one by one in the bottom right-hand corner of every webpage on the site, replacing the flame from the university logo.

“The banners will help utilize the real estate on the web page,” Tucker said.

The real estate Tucker is talking about isn’t concerned with selling a house for a better price or surveying land to get an accurate measurement; it just means the available space on a webpage.

In addition to helping the website use available space in the best possible way, Tucker said that the banner rotation “provides more visibility for current events.”

And there you have it. IT is committed to promoting innovation, one step at a time.

New WebAdvisor options make employees’ lives easier

8th November | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

WebAdvisor saw some new additions and changes this fall, making a few aspects of business here at Lee just a little bit easier.

Web procurement and benefits enrollment online are two changes that went live September and October 2012 after being under development since spring.

Kathy Jackson, business analyst for IT Systems, explained that these two system improvements make life all-around easier for those who have to deal with them.

Web procurement refers to the new way for staff and faculty to enter accounts payable invoices and purchase orders (sometimes known as vouchers).

These used to be filled out and approved in Colleague, which meant having to go through page after page to get where you needed to go. Now those approving vouchers and those entering them can go in to a single page on WebAdvisor and approve them.

“It’s a win/win for both the people who enter the vouchers and the people who have to approve them. Much more time efficient,” Jackson said.

Benefits enrollment online is also designed to make things easier for faculty and staff. Before, when an employee at Lee wanted to enroll in health insurance options they had to fill out a big pink form and someone had to manually enter all of that information to send to the insurance company.

Now all an employee has to do is go on to WebAdvisor, choose the options for coverage they want, and submit it.

These changes are designed to make the regular tasks of employees at Lee easier, and just a couple of the many projects IT has going in order to improve the technological environment at Lee University.

Business intelligence to bring improved data organization

| No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

IT Systems is currently in the planning stages for ramping up Lee’s business intelligence capabilities.

“By [improving business intelligence], you give the users a lot more control of what they see and how they see it,” said Jesse Houle, a programmer analyst and the lead on this project.

Business intelligence involves an organization using software tools to aggregate and sort tremendous amounts of data and analyzing it to help make smarter business decisions.

Right now IT Systems does that in the form of reports for the different sectors of the university. Once IT Systems finishes with the project, though, users will be able to create complex reports out of massive amounts of information.

Houle said that part of the process of improving BI is developing data warehouses. These will bring together information from various sources and pool them together to make reports easy to create, rather than requiring users to go to multiple sources for that data.

The new BI capabilities will be hosted on Portico when they’re finished, so users can log on and create reports. Users will be able to analyze and sort data on many different levels using PowerPivot, an add-on for Microsoft Excel.

PowerPivot will allow users to examine data in an almost infinite number of ways, filtering results through almost any criteria. This specification of data will help sectors pinpoint areas that need work.

This undertaking is not a small one, though. The organizational structure of the software will require much work to function correctly.

“It’s such a vast, complex setup that we need to make sure that we have those steps planned out very thoughtfully before we move forward,” Houle said.

With that said, IT Systems does not have a projected end date for the project.

Dashboards present data at a glimpse

29th October | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in About IT Staff and Student Workers

Data can be a hard thing to wrap your head around. Numbers upon numbers that can be arranged in multitudes of ways are perfect for making your head spin.

That’s why IT Systems is currently building dashboards. Michael VanHook, an analyst and report writer for IT Systems, has been working on this initiative for two years now.

“Think of the dashboard in your car. … You’ve got your odometer, your speedometer, gas gauge, all that. Basically [dashboards are] the same concept, but for different applications for different business units,” VanHook said.

Dashboards are data visualization programs that use charts and graphs that will help users get a sense of some of the data IT Systems has to offer.

Right now, IT Systems is working on dashboards for the vice presidents of the university. These dashboards, which can be accessed on Portico, are designed to give VPs a quick glimpse of their sectors.

These overviews will help them to see how their sectors are doing using key performance indicators.

Thus far four of the seven vice presidents’ dashboards have been finished and launched. The rest will be put up as they are completed.

Also in the works is a dashboard system IT Systems has dubbed “blueprint.” This dashboard contains a layered map of campus – it shows the rooms in each building across campus, as well as what’s scheduled in the rooms.

Blueprint aims to make scheduling rooms for a meeting much easier. Students and faculty can log on, look through rooms and scheduled events and book a room for use.