Web Management Tools

Action Items

The action item system has proven effective for managing tasks assigned to center members. It provides an electronic “to do” list to center members, viewable by everyone with a login. In addition, the action item list reduces unnecessary email traffic, serves as a mechanism for people with similar issues to participate in a single solution to the problem that satisfies all needs, and allows everyone to check the progress of open items for planning purposes.

Best Practices

The NSF has created a Best Practices Rubric for running an I/UCRC. This rubric is provided as a tool that allows an administrator to fill in the rubric to reflect the current status of the center and also change the list of best practices to better suit a particular I/UCRC. All users will be able to see the current status and download the rubric as a PDF file.

Core / Personnel Management System

This is one of the basic systems upon which many of the other tools in the toolkit depend. The primary purpose of this system is to track all center personnel. Center participants are divided into categories which define the access rights to information and sections of the website. For the CFSP, the categories are :

• students
• faculty
• site directors
• center director / administrator
• NSF evaluator
• industry partner

The Personnel Manger provides an interface for creating a new entry, deleting an existing entry, or modifying an existing entry. Only a person with appropriate rights, a site or center director, can perform these operations.

Core / Project Management System

The Project Manager is another fundamental tool which is utilized by other tools. Its purpose is to track current projects for the center as well as archive past projects for future data analysis and data mining. Only a person with system administrator rights can perform these operations.

Core / Document Management System

The document management tool facilitates the uploading of documents to other web pages on the site. At present, the document manager allows files to be added to the pages created for By-Laws, Member Agreements, Templates, Proposals, and Annual Reports and etc.

Core / Site Maintenance and Configuration

Discussion Boards

The discussion board tool is a private bulletin board for center members. A member can initiate a discussion and invite others to participate in the discussion. Only the person who initiated the discussion can add users to the board. A list of discussion topics is available for all center members to view, but only invited members can see the posting or add a posting.

Meeting Manager

A common administrative task that can consume noticeable amounts of time is scheduling and managing meetings. As noted in previous chapters, the CFSP has two Industrial Advisory Board Meetings per year with smaller interim meetings scheduled throughout the year. The meeting manager provides the following functionality :

• A link to the survey tool described elsewhere is the first stop for scheduling a meeting.
• A link to Document Setup is provided. This subsystem calls the document manager to automatically create categories of documents to be uploaded for the meeting.
• A link to the LIFE form system is generated on the meeting page. LIFE forms are used to facilitate a management review of projects

News and Events

Paper Review

A likely product of center’s activities is research articles and other documents for publication. Since proprietary information may be involved, it maybe necessary to have the approval of the center members prior to publishing. The paper review system provides :

• a web page where the author can upload the paper using the standard browse/upload interface.
• a list of reviewers which can be selected individually or as a group, such as “all center members”. The reviewers are automatically notified via email that a paper has been submitted which requires review.
• a date by which the review must be completed with a default of 30 days. After that date, acceptance is assumed to prevent unnecessary delays in publication.
• an interface that allows the reviewer to accept, reject, or request changes.

Reference Library

The reference library is a database of research articles, related to center projects, that is only available to center personnel. A user can upload a paper, search the database, and read any papers contained in the public collection. The web interface for uploading papers provides a standard browse/upload box and will accept documents in docx and pdf formats as well as jpeg images. Information about the paper, including title, author(s), where it was published, the full citation, keywords, and the date published, is provided by the person uploading the paper. In addition, this interface provides the user with a list of all papers he or she has uploaded and the ability to edit the information stored about the papers. The site director also has access to change any of the data stored in the library database.

Survey

The survey tool can be used as a stand-alone tool for an arbitrary survey or can be tied to the personnel manager and contact list systems. In the latter case, email lists can be created, or pre-built lists selected, for notification that a new survey has been created. The survey tool also allows access to responses and creates a summary of the responses

User Weekly Report