UMS-LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY

ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF

INFORMATION SYSTEMS

TERM PAPER

TOPIC- BASIC REQUIREMENTS FOR

DEVELOPMENT OF UMS IN LPU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
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I gratefully acknowledge my indebtness to my friends who helped me a lot in searching for the
information. They have been a great source of inspiration for me .I have been receiving a number
of suggestions and comments from them but it is not possible to acknowledge their names in the
term paper individually. I also owe my gratitude to my parents who provided me with the
resources that helped me in the completion of this term paper.

No words are sufficient to express my gratitude to my subject teacher Mr. Anupinder Singh for
his exemplary support and guidance.

Any constructive comments, suggestions and criticism will be highly appreciated and gratefully
acknowledged.

Pooja Nanda

R.No-RB1702A02

INDEX

CONTENTS PAGE NO.

1.INTRODUCTION 3
2. PROJECT STARTING POINT 3-4
3.THE CURRENT SITUATION IN BRIEF 4-5
4. REQUIREMENTS AND GENERAL FRAMEWORK 5
5. PORTAL AND IDENTITY MANAGEMENT 6
FUNCTIONALITY
6. OPEN SOURCE COMPONENTS 6
7. AN ADDITIONAL INTEGRATION ISSUE 6-7
8. WHY USE A UMS 7-8
 USES
 BENEFITS
9 .COST AND ISSUES RELATED TO THE UMS 8
10. SAMPLE PROJECT MANAGEMENT BY ‘HISINONE’ 8-10
11. REFERENCES 10
12. BIBLIOGRAPHY 10

INTRODUCTION

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A University Management System in LPU(and in other universities in general) is an MIS which

is a planned system for collecting, storing and processing data regarding students and faculty in
the form of information which is needed to carry the functions of the university. Basically it
assists management of the university in making decisions and solving problems. They draw on
data stored as a result of transaction processing, but they may also use other information.

A UMS is basically a web-based information management system, designed to automate the

entire operations within a modern university. Its function is to provide full support for multiple
colleges and multiple departments, providing a very flexible, easy-to-use user interface and
parameterized options.

An ideal UMS should not stop at the point of administration and management, but should extend
to provide instructors with a full picture on the academic standings of each student. It should also
provide any-time inquiry about any student’s academic position, in addition to other
administrative information related to student affairs like attendance, documents, marks,
transcript, courses and many more to help the administration departments in decision making and
full status monitoring.

The UMS can be built using Microsoft .NET technology, driven at the back-end by using
Microsoft SQL Server, which gives the application more power in security, scalability and
maintainability.

PROJECT STARTING POINT:

The UMS in LPU is managed by the ‘InfoTech’ department. The software used by them is sorted
by functional areas reflecting the traditional distribution of tasks in university management.
These are as follows:

 Applications

 Student examinations

 Examinations

 Management of courses and research

 Faculty management

 Facility management

 Human resources

 Financial and physical resources

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 Controlling, statistics and reporting

These components are connected by web devices and database couplings and import/export
functions. InfoTech basically implements a service oriented architecture but a little bit of
heterogeneity can be accepted.

THE CURRENT SITUATION IN BRIEF:

Currently the working of UMS in LPU represents a mix of client- server and web based
architectures. In this field of student life cycle, it also supports the functionalities for self service
by students or lecturers which are here implemented as web based solutions as follows:
 Online applications
 Student administration self service
 Examinations registrations and grading

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Functions for administration staff and parts of the business logic are implemented in the client-
server part. The module for management of courses and research is already a pure web
application.

REQUIREMENTS AND GENERAL FRAMEWORK:

In order to achieve a robust and a comfortable user experience, a precise coordination with the
requirements of business and academic processes in the university needs to be there. As a matter
of fact LPU affords a variety of business expenses and processes. It must be possible to
customize the software to these processes. But this flexibility comes at a price and this is not the
ambition of every university and they also don’t have the time and money for an extensive
customization.

Integration is an important issue. This primarily means that a user does not ‘see’ different
applications while performing different applications on the UMS. In nutshell it also means
integration with other applications as shown in the table below:-

Students, faculty Other staff

WEB PORTAL

 Applications  Human resources

 Admission Management of courses  Financial resources

and research
 Examination  Statistics

 Student  Reporting
Administration
 Controlling
 Certificates

University service
infrastructure-coordination
of basic person and
organization information

PORTAL AND IDENTITY MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONALITY:

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In the case of UMS of our university designed by InfoTech; students, faculty, staff and all others
access it via a personalized portal. This portal contains a’ single sign on’ support (e.g. in case of
students registration number and a password is asked in order to access the UMS) and integrates
all the components as described previously.

The portal can also provide access to a certain amount of functionality and information to an
anonymous user who can be a prospective applicant, a research partner or the general public
searching general information about the university.

OPEN SOURCE COMPONENTS:

The high quality open source components and development environments that can be used are:

 Mozilla, Firefox (web browser)

 Apache (web browser)

 Tomcat (application server)

 PostgreSQL (database system)

 Open office (office software)

 Linux (operating system)

 Eclipse (development environment)

AN ADDTIONAL INTEGRATION ISSUE:

To satisfy the integration issue, a service oriented architecture is required for the development of
the UMS. Extensibility can be achieved primarily by connecting new service components or
changing the “wiring” of existing services. In cases where a closer coupling of the extensions is
required plug-in technologies can also be used.
In the basic architecture of the specified UMS developed by the Info-tech department, every
functionality available on the web user interface should also be available to other software
components via the web service provider interface. State changes are not only reflected in the
UMS databases, but can result in actions on other systems as well (this can be carried out by web
service consumer interfaces).
The entire process explained above is simplified and can be better understood with the help of
the following diagram:-

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WHY USE A UMS:

 USES

 To manage the bulk content of a university.

 Provides public and/or internal access to that content as per requirements.
 Allow staff and/or end users to create corresponding the content (such as assignments,
display marks and grades, display attendance)
 Group collaboration(such as of students and faculty, faculty and HODs, etc)

 BENEFITS

 Functionality
o Creates a complex yet a dynamic site.
 Appearance and Usability
o Organizational and coding standards.
o Uniform appearance and branding.
o Separate content from presentation.

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o Page layout, header, footer, navigation bar, color scheme, etc.

 Efficiency: reduces staff time for administration and maintenance by a great amount
o less technical Web expertise needed(quite simple to use by amateur computer
users in the staff)
o Content staffs focus on content.
o Technical staffs focus on presentation and coding.

COSTS AND ISSUES RELATED TO THE UMS

 Server and/or client software licenses.

 Administrators needed to manage the software and users
o Security holes and bugs.
o Regular upgrades.
 No long-term industry-leading UMS packages
o New and unreliable.
o No standard set of features.
o Time-consuming to switch to another package.
 Inflexibility
o Customization limited without programming.
o Difficult to mix scripting languages.
 Separate tools or a custom-built UMS may be a better option.
o Features may be unneeded or missing.
o SSIs, style sheets and JavaScript for headers, footers and look and feel .
o Linux, Apache and Samba for managing user and directory permissions.
 Still need enforcement of content structure and quality
o Organize content of pages into categories and hierarchies.
o Create a navigation structure that is logical for users.
o Review page content for accuracy, writing style, etc.
o Too easy for novices to post pages without review.

SAMPLE PROJECT MANAGEMENT BY ‘HISINONE’:

To understand the management of this project of UMS development by Info-tech, the following
example of an open source project can be considered:-
In the following example, a cooperative project management with participating partner
universities is instituted, including the necessary infrastructure. It offers and presents a promising
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approach which is under way with the nonprofit service provider for university management
systems as a “base” and is coordinated by a cooperative development “HISinOne”, which aims at
creating an integrated university management system “from universities for universities”.

The above road map shows a significant overlap between the current generation (”GX”) and the
new One (HISinOne) . This is necessary, because it cannot be expected that 200+ universities to
switch their enterprise software at the same time. The road map is supplanted by detailed plans
for each year with detailed activities and mile stones. An executive level advisory board does
accompany this project. An important goal is a high level of transparency for all of the involved
partners.
Apart from the planning and organizational activities a technical project infrastructure is also

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established in the recent years. A central role has a lot of related cooperative knowledge
management, which is based on enhanced Wiki technology. The well known Media Wiki engine
(whose primary use is Wikipedia) is used for the required purposes. This engine is supplemented
by a sophisticated rights management and other small additions to support the quality
management process.
Requirements and Bugs are traced with the help of a ticket management system “HisZilla”,
which is based on the proven Bugzilla software. Version management for source code is done
with CVS. The creation of distributable versions and automated testing is carried out by a (self7
made) build management system which does nightly builds. These nightly builds are candidates
for beta tests at partner universities. Major versions are released every year, minor updates
approximately every 3 month.

REFERENCES

For the completion of this term paper the following references were sited:-
 IRANGE.net
 http://hisinone.de
 www.wikipedia.com
 GVC.sitemaker

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following books were referred to in the completion of this term paper:-
 Analysis and design of information systems-By James A. Senn
 Analysis and design of information systems-By V.Rajaraman

The following abstract was also referred:-

Learning of Management Systems- Learning Management System Reviews- by Learning
Technologies Centre, written by George Siemens

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