Angela Johnston
CIS 798 Project
Faculty Database Application

Project Description

Problem

Over the past several years, the Agronomy department has hired graphic artists and student programmers to update the content and layout of the departmental web pages.  The department has also formed a web committee that determines what information to post and checks to make sure outdated information is removed.  Despite the department's effort to update the website's content, many errors remain on the individual faculty pages.

Solution

We need a process to ensure that accurate content is quickly available on these pages. Creating a database application could allow the faculty to directly update their web page information and eliminate errors.

The database application that I am developing will allow the faculty to directly update their web page information using online forms connected to a database. Changes made to these forms will be immediately reflected on the faculty web pages.

Background Information

The Agronomy website runs on Microsoft ‘s Information Internet Server (IIS).  Microsoft designed Active Server Pages to run on their IIS, and the necessary ASP extensions have already been installed on the server.  The computing office uses Microsoft FrontPage as their HTML development tool, and Microsoft included compatibility with Active Server Pages in FrontPage.  Therefore, I have chosen ASP to develop the faculty application.

Application Security

Another important issue that we need to consider for the faculty web application is security.  Although we want the application to be available to the entire faculty through the internet, we do not want everybody with access to the internet to make changes to the faculty’s individual web pages. 

After speaking with Will Baldwin, the Oznet database administrator, I have located for the faculty web application an intranet platform that will allow only the faculty and administrators to logon to the site with a user name and password.  Using ASP, I can determine which faculty member has logged on to the intranet and allow access only to his/her web information.