Ok, network level control through your website. Interested? Good.
Last summer, a project of mine was to build a micro site which runs within the VLE that would give ordinary staff users access to network level functions that would normally be reserved for IT staff. This project would be purpose built for our new student help desk, so that students could have a 'one stop shop' experience as we continuously dubbed it. The key to this project would of course be ease of use. We needed a solution that everybody could just pick up and run with from day one, and something that we would need to give very little support to.
The first hurdle would be to determine which services our students would need. The new site would have to integrate with the following systems: -
- Active Directory for network level and user management;
- MIS system for course management, timetabling, exams and attendance;
- Connect VLE (Moodle) for course management and job logging;
- PaperCut print management for printing credit;
Next, we looked at the interface, and how we could make it as easy as possible for our staff to use the system. A quick conclusion was that big, easy to use buttons, with minimal keyboard input and touch input would be the way forward.
The first screen that the user would need to see would be some sort of search facility. This is just one big text box with some JavaScript on it to constantly give it some focus. Users can input into this box into a variety of ways, including the traditional typing of random strings such as the username, first name, surname or a combination of these. Once the search results are returned, a list is given back with possible results. Each result shows the full name, username and picture of the student in question. The user then clicks on the tab to take the user into the possible functions. The other method of input would be from the barcode scanner attached to the desk that would quickly scan the back of the student card that we give out at the start of each year that contains the username in barcode format.
Just so that we can confirm the user, the picture is printed on the card, and the same picture will appear on screen once the card has been scanned which points at a network share.
The user is then presented with four departmental options that are displayed as tiles, as well as a quick overview of the status of the student underneath. This overview can quickly establish any problems, such as disabled accounts (and who disabled it), printing credit balance, and user data quota. Clicking on any of the department tiles then gives another set of tiles that are specific to that particular department, i.e. in IT Services are functions such as 'enable / disable account', 'reset password' etc. When clicking on any of these options, you can see instantly the status of the option, so say you've clicked on the 'enable / disable account', the tile will then show 'disable account' because the account is already enabled. This is not too dissimilar to how Microsoft use the 'Live Tiles' implemented on Windows Phone 7, although I did it first for the record!
The next step was to make all of these functions. The functions that we decided on were: -
- Enable / disable account;
- Unlock account;
- Add to Moodle course;
- Reset password;
- Log new IT job (e.g. scanner not working);
- Print student timetable;
- Print exam timetable;
- Attendance queries;
- Order replacement student / bus cards;
- Add printing credits via PaperCut API;
The network level functionality was achieved using both LDAP and SLDAP (for password reset) commands as well as network shares to link to student photographs. Interaction with the PaperCut APIs made changing printing balances very easy with just one short command, and the other functionalities listed consisted of ODBC transactions to a set of different servers.
The site was locked down and would only be given to certain users based on permissions, as well as only being accessible internally to stop network intrusion. The hardware that we ended up purchasing was a Dell Inspiron One machine with an attached barcode scanner to read in the student cards. This has worked well, however we have found that most users have still preferred to use the traditional mouse and keyboard.
I hope that this will help somebody in some way, and I am happy to share any details on how certain parts of this were achieved.
