UCSC AIS Web Applications
Overview
Sites Designed and Developed while working for the University of California's Communications and Systems Development Web Development Team and Academic Information Systems (AIS). Most sites were written in CFML (Cold Fusion Markup Language) and utilize the language's C like scripting constructs and easy ODBC interaction. 80% of the sites in this section were designed, developed and hand-coded from the ground-up, on my own. The others were completed with design and code help from my supervisor.
Many of these sites followed a similar database-driven design pattern. I developed over 15 full featured independent web applications over the period of almost three years of part-time and summer work. These listed below are a good representative sampling of that work.
Student/Public Applications
- UCSC Student Portal
- Student Employee Request System
- Staff HR Online Application Center
- Evaluation Data System
Staff Internal Applications
Student/Public Applications
UCSC Student Portal
This site was by far the most involved project we embarked on. The site allows students to login and receive campus messages, keep a personal calendar, lists of enrolled classes, movie listings, sports ticker and more. I designed and coded the calendar and all of the home page modules. The customization features were written by my supervisor. There are even staff and admin interfaces to administer the links, send messages, manage themes ect.
- Fully customizable, with content and theme management.
- Fully featured Calendar with enrolled course entries
- Quarter, Month, Week and Daily views
- Repeating, un-timed and stand-alone events allowed
- Tie-in's to Student Communication Manager to allow events to be pushed to the Calendar
- Enrolled course view
- Campus Channels and Message System
- News feeds updated every 20 minutes.
- Movie listings
- Sports Ticker
Student Employee Request System
This was my first major ColdFusion application, so my supervisor did most of the back-end page flow control and session management. I handled the monstrous forms and data manipulation required to stuff the whole thing into a DB. The front end of the application is modeled after a simplified version of HotJobs or Monster.com resume posting service. The back end staff interfaces were hindered by the spaghetti like business process that are required to create, post and authorize student jobs, but the application handles all of this quite eloquently.
- Students apply for on-campus positions posted
- Students may keep a profile with common information and saved resumes.
- Up to 5 individual resumes may be named and saved by students.
- Resume's may be applied to certain jobs or posted for public view.
- Staff members post job notices and collect applications submitted by students.
- Hierarchy of access level mirrors job position as supervisors create job descriptions and forward to service centers for approval where they are finalized and posted.
- Any exceptions or requests for reviews may go to service center staff.
- Career center staff have "root" access to post, remove or approve any job listing.
- Staff may also browse public resumes based on category or name.
Staff HR Online Application Center
Designed as a simple quick and solution to allow prospective staff to apply online for jobs listed at the Staff Human Resources Website. Only provides for profiles with saved information common to all job applications and an area to copy and paste their resumes and cover letters. Submitted applications are put into a queue where they may viewed and printed for later entry into a mainframe's non-relational database.
- Staff may create and manage profiles which will contain common information applied to all jobs.
- Advanced secure password management system provides for safe reset of password based on unique URL, and security question prompted for during the creation of the profile.
- Un-safe HTML tag remover allows for guaranteed safe view of resumes' and cover letter's by Staff HR employees.
Evaluation Data System
Site designed to allow students transferring to UCSC to check if the courses they wish to transfer are accepted by the departments curriculum. Uses many features aimed at providing ease of use beyond that of most web applications. Courses found may be saved in a cache for later lookup, and printing. Course search is performed in a step-wise school selection and subsequent course lookup feature with the schools searched being saved for later quick lookup.
- Feature-rich user interface allows for quick navigation in a complicated site.
- Uses search criteria caches for quick lookup and retrieval.
- Allows transferred courses to be queried and saved in a "favorites" section for later printing or review.
Staff Internal Applications
Outreach Activities Planner
Allows UCSC Regional Representatives and their supervisors to schedule, events and visits at high schools in the state. It replaces many paper and antiquated FileMaker Pro databases from where the data was imported. Includes an administrative feature to allow a subset of the accounts to perform routine maintenance functions on the site. There is also a tie-in to the TUCSCH Application site in which applications submitted may be viewed, edited and approved through this site.
- Allows for ubiquitous communication between Representatives and Supervisors regarding the progress and status of the events.
- Includes calendar to provide graphical views of any month's events.
- Personalized home page with a list of logged in representative's scheduled and created events.
- Maintains a database of volunteers which may be dispatched to these events.
- Maintains a database of Schools and their contacts to which the events take place.
Student Communications Manager
Developed to allow staff members access to the links and resources they own as well as a messaging system used to send targeted messages.
- Allows authorized Student Affairs employees to create messages targeted at a subset of the student population based on many fields in their academic profile.
- Alternative method of deliver allows administrators of a "Channel" to send messages to students subscribed to that channel.
- May push messages as calendar events on students calendars.
- Allows for subsequent editing or deleting of messages once they are sent.
Support Cluster Tech Request System - Ticket Administration
Staff Interface to public trouble report system. Through relentless modifications and ad hoc feature adds, is now a pretty fully-featured support request tracking system.
- After submitting a help request, support specialists my log in, view pending requests and log hours spent.
- Staff submitting a request may view the status of their request and correspond with the support specialists.