Internet Tools Access Administrative Data

Abstract

The University of Delaware provides widespread access to its formerly closed, proprietary administrative systems in order to deliver improved customer service to students, faculty, researchers and others. The free, public, outreach technologies of the Internet (such Gopher, Mosaic and e-mail) have been merged with the closed, proprietary administrative systems of the institution (such as student records and human resources); providing new levels of service. Private, personal information; such as grades, transcripts, schedules and benefits, is integrated with the public, general information of the campus-wide information system. Freely distributed network clients running on DOS, Windows, MAC and Unix workstations allow the access of this official, production data from both MVS and Unix platforms. The application of these new network information technologies has allowed Delaware to build successful new partnerships with institutional customers. The methods employed to achieve this success are simple, inexpensive and easily adapted by other institutions. Paper presented at CAUSE94, the full proceedings of which are available through this Library as PUB1094. A revision of this paper was published in_CAUSE/EFFECT_ magazine, and is available as CEM9533.