Faculty Evaluation System

Our task was to build a system for the faculty that would ease the process of submitting annual Performance Activity Reports (PARs). The existing process was the submission of Word documents that were not similarly structured, resulting not only in the waste of many forests of trees each January, but the additional overhead for the readers (department chairs and the dean) of parsing each person's format and flow.We knew that the faculty didn't really enjoy this process, so we had to make it fast and simple to do. Ajax was the ideal solution:

• Fast, responsive UI
• Eliminate postbacks in as many situations as possible
• Provide immediate feedback for every activity
  

We were also dealing with an environment where the users were on a variety of platforms - 85% Windows, 10% Mac and the rest on various flavors of Linux running a crazy number of browser variants. This made the use of Ajax extremely challenging, but considering the fact that the "old" way of doing web applications would not solve the responsiveness problem and Flex 2 wasn't anywhere near ready to use (and 1.5 was entirely too expensive), we had to make it work.

We succeeded and received feedback from faculty members like:

Features

• Copy entries year-to-year
• Quick per-section reports
• Fine-grained access controls
• Sections and items customized to your needs
  
• Output report data in PDF, Word and Excel
• Statistical reporting per department and person

Try it out on our Labs site . After trying it out, contact us! We can set you up with a customized version for you and your staff and have you ready to collect your faculty performance data online very quickly!

Technical Requirements:

• ColdFusion MX 7/8
• Apache or IIS web server
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (or newer)
• Clients must use a reasonably new web browser (IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2+)