Richard Lee – Lead Systems Analyst, Vermont State Colleges
Dianne Pollak, Director of Amin. Info Systems
**** This is a VERY fast presentation so I won’t be able to do it justice (personal comments).
Vermont State College system – 13,000 students –
The Force Behind the Project:
- Eliminate paper
- Encourage Self Service
- 4 Colleges with 4 meal plans each
- unlimited meal plan
- 12 meal plan
- 8 meal plan
- 150 block
- Each plan has 3 options
PROCESS
- students are billed for the highest meal plan at all campuses
- after billing, students can go into WebAdvisor and choose the meal plan that is best for them
- the bill is a adjusted and a meal plan confirmation is emailed
- a list of students and their selected meal plans is created for each dining facility
This Presentation
- students bill
- meal plan change screen – WebAdvisor
- meal plan change screen – Portal
- change confirmation – goes as an email
- updated bill (there is a subroutine in Datatel that updates the info)
- view student meal plan web log
The technical stuff: Under the Hood
- form designer for Meal Plan Form (Colleague studio)
- screen to enter office information and text for meal plan screen – the meal plan people actually update the information themselves – this is a custom screen
- w3schools.com – favorite place to get html <tags>
- CODE to populate the meal plan table for Web Form (WOW… can I had this to our Datatel programmer and get this done??! I hope so)
- Add New Record to Meal Plan File CODE
- Post this meal plan assignment to the AR file using colleague subroutine CODE
- Confirmation Email to Student CODE (html email through popmail)
Comments
- Link on the food service web page back to the WebAdvisor page
- 48 meal plan choices on EACH Campus
- Were an early adopter for the SharePoint Server 2010 Portal
- Screen DOES show the Current meal plan
Questions
- Start & End dates? Each campus has their own end dates
- Through the regular billing process they are automatically billed at the highest rate and then they can adjust it in the system.
- There is no automation between Meal Plan and the provider – they get a LIST of the students who are signed up through the system – the systems do not talk to one another currently. Another school actually EMAILS any changes to the person in the company.
- They don’t REQUIRE a top plan but it should be able to be done through programming so that it recognizes them when they log in – they have fewer choices or it says you are unable to make that choice
DATATEL: Res Life Focus Groups – three one-hour meetings
- working on three updates over the next year
- first one – fixes auto room assignment and RMAS room assignment
- hopefully other enhancements – hopefully Suites – looking to see what other schools are doing
- Evaluating what the needs are, etc.