Adobe Success Story

East Carolina University is the third-largest university in North Carolina, and offers a broad range of traditional and interdisciplinary majors to more than 18,000 students.

Challenge

To build a dynamic portal that serves and facilitates the lives of students, faculty, and staff.

Benefits

· ColdFusion tag-based syntax is perfect for beginning users yet allows experienced developers to create complex online applications
· Time saved in development far exceeded the price of servers and development environments
· Rapid Development—Ready to code in four days. Roll out winning application in three weeks
· 80% of the student, faculty, and staff use the Web-based applications.

Project Details

As the third-largest university in North Carolina, East Carolina University offers a broad range of traditional and interdisciplinary majors to more than 18,000 students. Founded in 1907 and growing to become a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina, ECU boasts nationally accredited programs in business, social work, and technology, as well as academic programs of high distinction in music, art, and theatre.

One of the hallmarks of the university is its pervasive adoption of technology in all areas. Distance learning, telemedicine, and an emphasis on computing technology in education, training, and research are all integral to the ECU mission.

However, it wasn't long ago that access to ECU's administrative and academic systems was hindered by limited-access processes that created long lines and frustrating delays.

According to Phil Hulsey, New Technologies Development Group (NTDG) application architect/developer and Steven Forehand, NTDG Manager, ECU's internal applications were primarily developed using CICS COBOL for the IBM OS/390 platform and DB2 database and were accessed through 3270 terminal emulators.

"Virtually everything—course registration, academics, billing, HR, and finance - was custom written in COBOL," said Forehand. "The problem was a lack of distributed access to that information. Most of our students actually live off-campus, and during peak periods—new-semester registration, for example—they would stand in multiple lines on campus for hours spending only minutes actually registering, paying for classes, and receiving their financial aid package."

To respond to the problem, ECU began providing application access from Web browsers. "We started with 'course seat availability' where students could check courses offered, times, dates and available seats," said Forehand. "The Student Programming Team wrote a COBOL batch job to present the information in HTML. That would run nightly or weekly, so the information wasn't really dynamic. But at least students could get answers to simple queries remotely without waiting for hours."

Working with the human resources department, Forehand was charged with providing Web browser access to ECU's human resources application that manages staff positions. "We were looking at writing a lot of Perl to accomplish that," said Forehand, "and we figured that there HAD to be a better way."

Looking for a way to streamline Web access to its internal legacy systems and easily create new application services, ECU completed a quick evaluation of development tools and application servers. "We took a look at ColdFusion and saw very quickly what it could do," said Hulsey. "We saw that it would be ideal for providing access to our legacy data and had a potential for future access to our existing transactional-based systems. We looked at a couple of other solutions but they weren't even close in ease of use or functionality."

Part of the Macromedia Business Platform, ColdFusion provides a fast method for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database technologies. Open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. ColdFusion also provides security on every level, from Web development through deployment.

ECU licensed two ColdFusion Enterprise application servers along with five copies of ColdFusion Studio, which provides visual programming, database, and debugging tools for building sophisticated ColdFusion Web applications. "This is a much better solution for ECU," said Hulsey. "The tag-based scripting is appealing as it allows us to take SQL and logic written for a COBOL application and apply it cleanly in ColdFusion. Doing so allows great reusability of carefully crafted code."

"The price was also compelling," added Forehand. "This is definitely a cost-effective solution. Before long, we had created two award-winning human resource applications. One application lets users check position vacancies and enter their job-application online. Not only is this more convenient for applicants, it also enabled us to efficiently produce the reports that we need for state government. We're also drawing a larger, more talented pool of applicants."

ECU also used ColdFusion to create a Web-based performance-evaluation system to grade its employees. These two Web-based HR applications were cited by the College and University Personnel Association (CUPA) as two of the top five outstanding examples of "best-practices" for HR management.

"ColdFusion has been instrumental in achieving these successes," said Forehand. "Before we purchased ColdFusion, I had spent months just getting prepared to start developing these HR applications with Perl. With ColdFusion, I was ready to build within four days. In fact, we rolled out a first version of what ended up being an award-winning application in only three weeks."

ECU's next goal was to provide a central location where students could retrieve and manage their official University information dynamically online. The system was modeled around the 'desktop' paradigm, a central point of access and collection of related tools that became known as The ECU Student Desktop.

Over the course of time, the ECU Student Desktop evolved to include a broader range of tools and information applications. ColdFusion allowed students to gain access to information once unavailable remotely. The current core of the ECU Student Desktop was developed over a span of four months and is currently used by more than 75% of the student population.

Birth of a Portal

Embarking on their ColdFusion-powered development projects, The New Technologies Development Group conceived "OneStop"—an integrated Web portal where students, faculty, and staff can communicate, access numerous services and information sources to conduct transactions, and get the data they need.

"We decided that it made sense to integrate all of these applications into a permissions-based Web portal," said Forehand. "The student can set up preferences, see news and weather, get online course views, and more. It's designed for the entire ECU community—students, faculty, and staff."

At first, the group focused on providing dynamic Web-based access to existing COBOL/DB2 applications. "For example, we used to simply post a static document on majors offered," said Hulsey. "Now, we give people dynamic access through a query. We have a student locator that is like an online student guide. If a student missed a class and wants to get in touch with a classmate for notes, they can search by courses, hometowns, or states and quickly locate their peers."

Another application—the Degree Audit Reporting System—is a commercial application that audits student transcripts and determines what courses will be accepted for credit (called a "transfer articulation"). ECU can now take that data and make it available to students.

Additional online applications include notification of parking tickets and hold tags, purchasing parking decals, surveys, and grades/GPA reports.

Expanding to Include New Services

shopper" created with ColdFusion mimics a traditional e-commerce experience where students browse and place course selections into a shopping cart and "check out," initiating a COBOL transaction. This application will soon be accessible from WAP phones and wireless PDAs.

Faculty can also use OneStop to streamline their student advising process. "We want to enhance the advising process," said Hulsey, "so we created a Web-based system that lets the professor see the appropriate details on their students—from classes taken to home address. This lets them focus on advising, not administrative issues."

In addition to students and faculty, more than 5,000 ECU staff members can access OneStop as well—including the integrated functionality of previous and new applications. By providing online access to these applications, ECU gives employees, especially second and third shift workers, availability to access and update their information any time of day.

"We've had a half million logins over the past 18 months and nearly 80% of the ECU community has used our online applications," said Hulsey. "It's very exciting to know that this new portal environment is having such a broad impact on the entire ECU community—and ColdFusion is a big reason for it success."

Site Summary

Macromedia Products:
5 Macromedia ColdFusion Studio 4.5, 2 Macromedia ColdFusion Server Enterprise 4.5

Hardware:
4 Dell PowerEdge 6300 four-way multi-processor servers (Intel Xeon 500 MHz processors)

Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 sp4

Database:
IBM DB2 for OS/390; and Microsoft SQL Server

Size of DB:
Student data is 60 GB in 635 tables

Development Team:
Five developers

Site Traffic:
Average of 10-20,000 hits per month from thousands of students, faculty, and staff

Benefits

Cost Effectiveness—Time saved in development far exceeds the price of servers and development environments

Rapid Development—Ready to code in four days. Roll out winning application in three weeks

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