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McMURRY UNIVERSITY
Course
CSC 3330
Professor
Mr. Louis Voit
Semester
Spring 2007
Group Members
Russell M. Cozart
Janne Herfurth
Project Outline...
Each student will join a group of two or three. Each group will examine a system requirement in support of an office and build a proposal to upgrade or acquire new systems.

Fundamental Project Focus Areas
- Number of users; support required
- Users' level of understanding
- Software, printing, storage, connections
- What fills the needs of the users and looks to future growth?
- What support will be needed?

 
Registrar System Upgrade
+ System Examined: McMurry Registrar's Office/Records Storage & Sharing.
+ Problems to Address: McMurry's Office of the Registrar currently has approximately ten thousand transcripts that have yet to be converted to digital storage. (All records prior to 1995) Keeping these records in their physical state creates an extremely inefficient situation for storage and, subsequently, retrieval and delivery. Each record requested, if it has yet to be digitized, requires an employee to physically pull the record from the vault, in paper form or on microfiche, then is copied onto transcript paper. When considering that the Office of the Registrar receives 20 to 30 transcript request per day in the off-peak seasons, the need for an efficient system becomes evident.
+ While deliveries to students or employers necessitates keeping the physical mailing of the transcripts, McMurry's Office of the Registrar has yet to join many other schools in the electronic transcript delivery sytstem.
+ In addressing these issues, we took into consideration the necessity of the systems to be relatively simple to use, assuming the users (6 Registrar Employess, ± 3 period outside users) have only a nominal level of computing knowledge. Also, the Registrar's Office is supported by the McMurry Help Desk for technology related problems. This means that the need for vendor-supplied onsite support for the new system would be minimal.
+ Proposal of Solutions: The new system would incorporate a new business-class scanner to collect the physical transcripts. The system will need high-level OCR, database, and management software. The digital transcripts will need to be housed in a new NAS Server. And the system will require software to interface with other universities, via the university LAN, for electronic transcript exchange.

Digitizing Records: The existing transcripts will need to be scanned by the scanner, and fed to the NAS. From there, the NAS will be supplied with a software package that combines the OCR with a transcript management system to automatically convert the new digital transcript into the national SPEEDE format used by schools to deliver transcripts electronically. No change will be required in printing hardware, since transcripts requested by students and employers will continue to be printed and delivered physically.

Electronic Transcript Exchange: The newly digital transcripts, as well as the transcripts already on digital file in the Office of the Registrar, can easily be converted into the SPEEDE format by the OCR/Transcript Management software package. The Registrar's Office purchased, but has never initialized, the software needed to interface with the University of Texas SPEEDE server (which links over 90 universities in Texas) or any other school using the EDI (electronic data interchange), via secure internet interface through McMurry's LAN for transcript delivery. UT also offers a free version of the software for the SPEEDE interface that is sufficient for McMurry's current needs.

Estimated Proposal Budget: $31,000.00
Itemization:
High-quality business-class scanner: $1,000.00
NAS Storage Server: $2,000.00
OCR/Transcript Management Software: $28,000.00

For the Future: Even the world of academia is affected by the increasing trends of technology to revolutionize the methods by which it conducts its affairs. As more and more schools approach the field of sharing transcripts, as well as other data and information, electronically, this new system will allow McMurry to be an efficient and effective member of this movement. They will be poised to integrate new modules of software to include many other forms of data in their electronic management system in the years that follow. The Office of the Registrar enjoys the luxury of being part of McMurry University, and having onsite support of technical problems from the help desk. Major support for the other components of the system will be provided by the vendors, and can be varied based on a later assessment of need.

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