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Track: Universities and Higher Education
Michelle Hawks
University of Arizona
East Room 203
Tuscon, AZ 85721
Telephone: 520-621-3045
Fax: 520-621-3045
E-mail: mhawks@arizona.edu
Craig Wissler
Development of an Institutional Approach for University Site License Management and Distributed User Support
Defining Issue: Management of an Esri site license and user needs in a university setting where departments are dispersed throughout campus. GIS Solution: At the University of Arizona a relational database was designed to track the numerous users and installed software on campus. A Web site and list server were also established to facilitate communication. Methodology: The issues dealt with in the approach used by the University of Arizona are software availability, installation tracking, and user services. A series of paper forms is used to keep track of software coming in and leaving the administrator's hands. The database is used to track which departments are running which software, and site license contribution information. A digital on-line request form for software is available to users through the Web site. A CGI program notifies the administrator that a request has been made when the form is filled out. It also takes the information from the user and enters the data into a comma-delimited
file that can than be entered into the database. Communication to the distributed user community is done through a list server, similar to Esri-L, which announces new arrivals of software and other GIS-related announcements (e.g., conferences, meetings, jobs) and allows people to post technical questions. A Web page also announces news to the user community. The goal of the Web page is to help make users more aware about GIS activities occurring on campus as well as provide them with services that may help them in their own projects. Some of the information available on the Web site includes university course offerings, departments using GIS, software available under the site license, and the on-line software request form. Software: The applications were designed to deal with the Esri site license administration. Microsoft Access was used to create the relational database for installation tracking. HTML and script programming in UNIX are used for the establishment and updating of the Web page. A
CGI program was used for the on-line software request form. The purpose of the paper is to present our approach to site license administration and user support in the distributed environment of a university.
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