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After completing my Ph.D. in 1997, I spent a few months getting up to speed on web site building, which included a small amount of work for the fledgling Oxford based Internet company Virtual Environments International and the creation of a basic website for the UK charity BioMedComm. I now run my own software development company.
In September 1997 I began work as a Computer Officer in the University of Essex Computing Service. While this was obviously quite a significant career change from being a tomato biotechnologist, I soon found my feet. At Essex I was responsible for a number of things, from creating user documentation to running the centrally managed web servers. Details of some of the projects I undertook at Essex are shown below:
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In common with most other UK academic institutions, the University of Essex has a large number of web documents spread over a number of web servers running on different combinations of server software and operating system. The Search facility of Microsoft Site Server 3.0 was used to provide a single search facility, which is accessible from all of the main University web pages. The search facility is able to index web pages, as well as the Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat documents found on the site. The front end to the Search facility was written in Visual Basic (Scripting Edition) using Active Server Pages technology. An article describing the importance of internal search engines is available.
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The Online Course Catalogue was an experiment to investigate the potential benefits in moving essential administrative information onto the Internet. The Course Catalogue is a centrally managed database that contains information about all the undergraduate and short courses run by the University. A web based front end to the database information was developed which allows prospective and current students the ability to search and view course details. The web front end to the catalogue was written in Visual Basic (Scripting Edition) using Active Server Pages technology, with the Site Server Search facility providing rapid searching of course details. Back end and administrative features of the course catalogue were written using Visual Basic 6 and Perl 5 (for Windows NT). |
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Private sector accommodation database As with most other UK academic institutions, a large proportion of students studying at the University live in accommodation rented from the private sector. Universities normally maintain lists of suitable accommodation available in the local area. However, preparing the lists for students is normally a time consuming and costly process. By moving the list onto the University Intranet, students can more easily search for suitable accommodation, and the Accommodation Office can devote less resources to providing printed copies of the list. |
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Internal
telephone and E-mail Directory Migration of email systems to Microsoft Exchange allowed the introduction of a successor to the basic X500 phone book search facility. The new phonebook was written using Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) to communicate with Microsoft Exchange using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Additional features of the phone book (such as a directory style listing of entries*) was created using Perl 5 (for Windows NT) *No longer accessible on the web |
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