University Business - July/August 2011 - (Page 76)

Office Of cOntinuing educatiOn Fresno Pacific University Credit Where It’s Due fficials at fresno Pacific University (calif.) had quite a few reasons to take the institution’s online distance-learning registration system from an external vendor and bring it in-house: Poor customer service and high costs. insecure and time-consuming methods of communicating with both students and instructors. Duplicate inputting of information. Manual processing of credit card transactions. Most pressing, though, was a troublesome security breach in 2006 that involved the compromising of a group of credit card numbers. “That was probably the major thing,” says Matt Gehrett, executive director of continuing education. “That brought it up to the point where we could get the resources of the university to focus in on it.” in the fall of 2007, a cross-campus team representing University communications, information technology, and continuing Education gathered to develop an in-house solution. Using Microsoft Visual studio’s asP.net and writing in c# O For students taking distance learning courses and administrators working behind the scenes, online registration is now a breeze. and VB.Net, an it programmer developed and implemented a new online registration system, housed on an internal iis web server. fresno Pacific officials cite unusually smooth cooperation as helping them to make what was a significant change. “it administrative cOmputing services Western Washington University Y Paper Chase OU NEED sOMEthiNG DONE. What are you told? “fill out a form.” Western Washington University officials figured there had to be a better way. the use of hard-copy forms to request services, they believed, was a waste of paper and time, as the requisitions had to be sent via campus mail to the appropriate parties, who in turn had to review, copy, and file them. Each person in the approval chain needed his or her own copy, and there was no central repository where the forms could be accessed easily. that’s to say nothing of forms—some of them quite important—that got lost, which sometimes took weeks for someone to realize. the university’s administrative computing services solved the problem by developing electronic versions of the approximately 200 forms used at the school. created by help Desk staff using a basic htMl editor, Esign forms support online data entry, routing via email for approvals and processing, digital signatures, and attachments. a simple piece of code at the bottom of each form leads the system to populate the form with the information a particular user needs and allows for storage of the data, routing of the infor- E-forms replaced mation, and storage of and access to hard-copy e-signatures. requests, and the “the forms are generic in the sense that the e-signature box is the same on university saved every single form,” says Bob schneider, time, paper, and director of administrative computing services. “it verifies that data against frustration. our sunGard Banner ERP system and it gets routed that way. it’s all in that one set of code.” Esign forms have reduced processing times from up to two to three weeks under the paper-based system to less than a day, and each user has an individual online repository to access any e-form he or she has ever processed. from October 2009 through september 2010, more than 75,000 Esign forms were accessed, submitted, and processed. 76 | July/August 2011 universitybusiness.com http://www.universitybusiness.com/modelsofefficiency http://www.VB.Net http://www.ASP.net http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - July/August 2011

University Business - July/August 2011
Contents
Editor's Note
Ad Index
College Index
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Financial Success
Money Matters
Community Colleges
Funding Capture
Models of Efficiency
Thwarting ID Thieves
Embezzlement Epidemic
What's New
End Note

University Business - July/August 2011