Frank Gates

Today's universities are recognizing the desirability of providing many staff functions for their students through a Web interface. Self-service applications allow students to enroll in courses, manage their personal information and examine their class schedules -and save the university time and expense for staff that would otherwise perform these tasks. In April 1999 New York State's Syracuse University went online to accomplish these activities over the Internet with a self-service application based on Enterprise JavaBeans technology. Here's how it was done. The Requirements Syracuse University had bought a new online student information system (SIS) from a leading software vendor. Unfortunately, the system didn't provide an adequate Web interface, and it was built from the point of view of administrators, not students, complicating how a Web-based solution could be... (more)