Monday, June 13, 2011

Customer Relationship Management System

We are working in the selection of an open-source CRM software for managing the university's interactions with its current and future students. Sugar and vTiger are being used in a testing environment.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Document Management System

To have an effective paperless office, we need a system to manage these documents. We'll test different document management systems to find out the one that fits best to our needs. Nuxeo or Alfresco are some of the possible open-source options.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Electronic locks

This integration project is deviced to develop a PHP API that communicates with our electronic lock provider's API. The PHP API will also communicate with our ERP.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Internet Fax

We are changing the way to send and receive faxes throughout the university services in order to reduce costs. With an internet fax service, you can send or receive a fax using your email program. No installation of modems or fax servers or phone lines. The management of faxes is easier and cheaper.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Content Management System

We want to select an outside vendor to create a new web portal. Different CMS will be examined: eZ Publish, Drupal. Special attention will be given to the ease of integration with our ERP.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Degree and Master's Final Project

In order to complete a graduate degree or a master's degree, according to the Bologna process, students must defend a final project. We are building a software application useful for students, teachers and staff members to keep track of all the projects.

Introduction
The ITLab has developed a computer program to manage a special type of subjects in the study plans named "Degree Final Project" or "Master Final Project". The implementation of official masters and degrees make it mandatory to finish all studies adapted to the European Higher Education Space with the preparation and defense of a final project.

The program's goal is to manage administrative tasks involved to monitor progression in the different studies taking into account the particularities of each degree or master. To do so, we've designed a form shared by all the degrees in which we ask a few questions that provide the basis to meet the requirements of each study. The results obtained through this form allowed us to make a flexible development adapted to the differences.

The information of the form is contained in a GoogleForm. It contains 30 questions to be answered by a person with a manager profile in the topic under study. Link to the form (spanish).

We wanted to give a generic name to the program. It couldn't be tied to any particular academic activity or associated to any type of study (degree or master). The APM initials match the requirements. APM stands for Academic Project Management.


Underlying technologies
Programming language: PHP 5
Programming environment: Zend Framework 1.11
Javascript Framework: jQuery 1.7
Database engine: PostgreSQL 8.3
Adapter authentication: LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
User authorization model, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
Current version:1.0


Application overview
In order to know the general approach to the final development of a new application, you can read the APM-slide document and the APM-notes document. The latter adds notes to the APM-slide.



Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Application Packaging

We try to create a controlled environment to package some of our applications in order to make them easily deployable for other companies. Thus, we'll contribute with the open source community sharing our own applications.