University-Wide Client/Server Applications: A Case Study

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               University-Wide Client /Server Applications:
                            A Case Study


                            Ygal Leibu
                            Registrar

                           Yves Bouchard
       Director, Student Information Systems, Registrar's Office

                           Hubert Manseau
                     Director, Computer Services

                  Universite du Quebec a Montreal
                     Montreal, Quebec, Canada



                           Abstract

This paper describes client-server applications developed and 
implemented at Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM), for the 
management of students' academic records. Although the Registrar's 
Office initiated these developments, the Registrar's Office 
receives full support and cooperation from UQAM's Computing 
Services in the development of client/server applications, as well 
as in their ongoing maintenance.

Our two departments' joint experience in this regard is an 
illustration of a general trend and of a new division of labor and 
responsibilities among users and MIS organizations in North 
American universities, in the context of scarce resources, 
downsizing and distributed computing.


Background

The Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM)

The Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM for short) is one of 
four universities in Montreal. It is a large, degree granting 
university, located in downtown Montreal and registering more than 
42,000 students. It was founded in 1969, as part of the province-
wide Universite du Quebec. In 1989 it was granted status of 
associated university with the Universite du Quebec and the right 
to confer its own degrees. The Universite du Quebec a Montreal is 
the largest constituent of the Universite du Quebec, offering 120 
undergraduates programs of study and 50 graduate programs of 
study, in 30 different academic departments. Although the majority 
of the student population is concentrated at the undergraduate 
level, the graduate programs and the research activities are 
developing fast: in 1992 the faculty was granted 25 million 
dollars in research funds.

The Registrar's Office at UQAM

At UQAM the Registrar reports to the Associate Vice-president for 
Academic and Student Affairs. The Registrar's Office is comprised 
of sixty-five positions and administers a budget of 2 million 
dollars, excluding salaries. Its mandate is

  * to recruit and to admit candidates to the programs of studies;
  * to register students for courses;
  * to update and to certify students' academic record;
  * to collect and to disseminate information on programs and 
courses offered;
  * to develop information systems supporting the management of 
services such as admission, academic advising and degree auditing;
  * to support the users of student information systems.

UQAM's Computing Environment

The Student Information System and the administrative systems run 
on a cluster of VAX/VMS. All mainframe based information systems 
are home grown and make little use of commercial software. They 
were developed and they are maintained by a Computer Services 
organization which supports both academic and administrative 
computing. The following diagrams illustrate the hardware (Figure 
1), the networking (Figure 2) and the SIS software (Figure 3) 
components of UQAM's computing environment.

FIGURES NOT AVAILABLE ELECTRONICALLY




What problems do we have?

UQAM's Student Information System is based on a legacy system, 
that is to say on a system which has developed through the years 
by additions. It is a system which is limited by old technology, 
but which cannot be changed radically because of operational 
constraints. Like in many other organizations, our legacy system 
has all the advantages and the inconveniences of mainframe based 
systems:

  * it is optimized for performance in the present mainframe 
environment: any significant change, such as conversion from a 
sequential file to a relational database management system, would 
require to increase the mainframe's capacity;
  * it is a closed system;
  * although it allows for on-line access, most of the 
transactions are in batch mode;
  * it offers limited access to data;
  * it does not allow easy query: even when one has access, one 
gets data which has to be tweaked in order to transform it onto 
meaningful information;
  * the data model is outdated, and cannot be changed easily;
  * security is far from being fool proof;
  * it is not integrated with the other administrative systems;
  * Computer Services is spending its time maintaining it and 
keeping it in tune with new academic regulations and requirements, 
instead of developing new applications or a new data model;
  * the backlog of applications is such that knowledgeable end-
users tend to develop systems locally, which in turn creates 
problems of data integrity and information accuracy.
Our Solution
When we began our conscious effort to change the approach towards 
computing in our university, we sought the following changes:

  * to replace a home grown student information system with one 
based on a commercially supported relational database management 
system;
  * to replace batch processing with on-line transactional 
processing;
  * to distribute data and processing cycles among mainframes, 
departmental servers, and personal desktop computers;
  * to offer users an integrated single image system, irrespective 
of computing platform, operating system or the place of residence 
of the data.

We undertook this effort without realizing the full implications 
for future development and without any guarantees that technology 
would grow to allow the accomplishment of these plans. 
Fortunately, as we kept moving along, solutions appeared which 
seemed to be tailor-made to our needs and to offer help in 
overcoming our difficulties, such as distributed computing, and 
graphical development and user tools. Among these, the 
client/server technology which the market adopted as the preferred 
architecture of the 90's plays a key role. Moreover, the 
appearance and the widespread adoption of theoretical 
conceptualizations such as Apple Computer's VITAL, which seek the 
peaceful integration of legacy systems within new enterprise based 
computing models, seems to justify retrospectively our intuitive 
approach.

Client/server SIS applications at UQAM

Because of the need for an efficient registration method, the 
Registrar's Office undertook in 1987 to develop jointly with the 
Computer Services our first campus-wide client/server application, 
the Touch Tone Registration System. The Computer Services 
developed the "registration server" on the mainframe, while the 
Registrar's Office developed the client telephone interface. The 
Touch Tone Registration System was the engine which brought about 
the first massive on-line transaction processing in UQAM's SIS - 
registration transactions. The successful implementation of this 
application led to the development of two other applications 
described below.

Touch Tone Registration System

Based on the voice processing technology, UQAM's Touch Tone 
Registration System (Systeme d'inscription par telephone or for 
short SIT) is an interactive transactional system, allowing 
students to register for courses by directly and securely entering 
courses into their student record, via a Touch Tone telephone. The 
choices are validated according to academic and administrative 
criteria and, if available, the space is reserved for the student. 
The same system allows students to change courses. The system is 
operational since 1990. Approximately 36,000 students, or 90% of 
the UQAM's undergraduate student population, are using this system 
every term.

Touch Tone Grade Consulting System

Also using voice response technology NOTEL (Systeme de 
consultation des notes par telephone) is UQAM's Grade Consulting 
System: students call NOTEL to learn what grade they obtained in 
their courses. Available around the clock seven days a week, NOTEL 
checks the identity of the caller and then declines, with a human 
voice, the grades registered in the student record. All UQAM's 
43,000 students are using NOTEL at the end of every term.

Graduate Studies Information and Management System

The aim of this application is to provide information and record 
management for UQAM's graduate studies. It is a client-server, 
distributed database, allowing graduate studies program managers 
to access official student record information and combine it with 
local data, residing on departmental workstations, in order to 
advise students on their progress. The application allows complex 
queries on the status of the student progress through his or her 
program of studies. Its user friendly graphical interface provides 
a working model for the UQAM's student record interface. 
Operational since January 1992, the application will be gradually 
implemented in all of UQAM' s graduate programs. Eventually, the 
application will be adapted for the management of UQAM's 
undergraduate student records.

Although the data model of these applications use alternatively 
either two, in the case of the telephone interface, or three 
layers, our preferred architecture is three layered, such as the 
one we are using in our Graduate Studies Information and 
Management System. This architecture is described in figures 4, 5 
and 6.

FIGURES NOT AVAILABLE





What Lies Ahead

Our ultimate goals for UQAM's SIS are simple:

  * to insure secure and universal access to UQAM's student 
information systems of all legitimate users, including students 
themselves;
  * to implement sophisticated applications such as Degree Audit, 
which will give academic advisors and students all the information 
they need to measure progress or lack of it;
  * to implement applications which help management decision 
making, in order to make better use of scarce resources.
During the next three years, while we are developing two new 
client/server applications (an Admissions information and 
management system and an Undergraduate Studies information and 
management system) and we shall seek:

  * to define security profiles for every user and implement 
security policy and procedures;
  * to give every user connected to the campus-wide high speed 
network transparent access to the Student Information System if 
his or her task requires it;
  * to extend to students the secure access to the SIS, both from 
within the campus and remote access, both via micros and ATM type 
machines;
  * to integrate at the desktop level in a graphical user 
interface all information contained in the student records and 
eliminate character based coded information;
  * to give users a coherent, intuitive and consistent interface, 
where information is in plain French rather then in computerese, 
irrespective of the application accessed or the operating systems 
under which it is accessed;
  * to make maximum use of the departmental servers and the 
desktop processing power in order to off load processing cycles 
from the mainframe.
Planned Student Data Access Architecture at UQAM

FIGURE NOT AVAILABLE

This architecture was inspired by the information harvesting 
architecture implemented at the University of Michigan. 
Information harvesting is a concept contained in VITAL, the 
Virtually Integrated Technical Architecture Lifecycle, designed, 
experienced and evangelized by Apple Corporation.

FIGURE NOT AVAILABLE

VITAL is not hardware, and it is not software. Rather it is a 1500 
pages blueprint, representing over 15000 hours of effort to 
overcame Apple's own... department-centric, incompatible and 
mainframe-based legacy systems. Since it was made public, VITAL, a 
platform and product independent architecture blueprint, was 
embraced by major organizations worldwide.

Half Way Conclusions.

Five years and several thousand hours of efforts later, what have 
we learned from our adventure in harnessing the power of 
information technology to improve services to students and to 
their faculty advisors?

The bad news, in the present financial context of most 
universities in North America, is that organizations have to 
invest in new technologies. Some of these investments such as in 
relational database management systems or new technologies such 
document management systems are quite significant and even risky 
given the competing emerging standards. Higher management will be 
reluctant to make these investments if the immediate benefits for 
a great number of users are not obvious and if payoffs cannot be 
demonstrated. Hence a very convincing case has to be made, not 
only technical but also on qualitative and economic grounds, that 
these investments are indispensable.

The good news is that technologies such as high speed public 
domain networks, graphical user interfaces, distributed database 
management systems, client/server architecture have matured during 
the last three years to the point where viable commercially based 
products exist. This dispenses us from reinventing the wheel, an 
business in which universities excel but which is terribly costly. 
These products allow us to shorten considerably the development 
and implementation cycle, to shorten learning curves both for 
developers and end-users, to optimize overall performance, to 
maximize the use of desktop computing power, to transparently 
transform data into information, and, in the final analysis, to 
deliver better quality information based services to students and 
to faculty.

Reference

Heterick, Robert C., A Single System Image: An Information Systems 
Strategy, CAUSE, The Professional Association for Computing and 
Information Technology in Higher Education, Professional Papers 
Series, #1, 1988
VITAL Fundamentals, Apple Computer Inc. , 1993