The ePARs system was developed by members of the Business Team, part of the IT Systems Division within Information Services at the University of Nottingham. Microsoft products feature heavily in the development toolset used by this department: data for ePARs is held in a Microsoft SQL Server 7 database and the ePARs application accesses student, staff and course information from the Student Records database (SATURN), as well as a Microsoft SQL Server database. For these reasons, the decision was taken to follow the Microsoft route, in terms of a SQL Server 7 database for NQTPDP and a Microsoft web development platform.
ePARs are hosted on a Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, running Internet Information Services 5.0 (IIS), which serves the web pages. The web pages have been produced using Active Server Pages (ASP) technology and Microsoft Visual Interdev 6 as the development platform. When a user logs into the web sites and requests a particular page, the web server (IIS) generates the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for the web page from the ASP code and delivers the page to the user's internet browser. To generate the majority of these web pages, the web server connects to the database to obtain the necessary information with which to formulate the dynamically produced page.
Additional software and licenses purchased were BrowserHawk, SoftArtisans SA-FileUp and SA-FileManager. BrowserHawk is used to detect information about the user's browser, which assists in the manner certain pages or windows are displayed. SA-FileUp and SA-FileManager allows users to transmit files from their hard drive or floppy drive to the ePARs database or web server and vice versa.
Information Services david.ford@nottingham.ac.uk
PADSHE Project angela.smallwood@nottingham.ac.uk
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