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Staff/Groups Database Project Proposal

Motivation

During the creation of the FaqMan tool, and in discussing how it will integrate with Router's Reference, we have noticed that there is no central location for storing information about C&C Client Services staff. This creates difficult tasks and duplicated code within the tools developed for Client Services. Additionally, it requires changes in the staff to be updated in many places.

Initial Project Goals

To address these problems, we propose a project with the following goals:

• Maintain a list of select full-time Client Services staff and all student staff
• Maintain a list of groups to which above individuals may belong
• Support queries in two directions: person belongs to these groups and group contains these people
• Possibly maintain an extensible list of privileges which can be applied to groups or people
• Create a simple web interface for adding/removing/editing person and group information
• Create a code interface or API, intended for use by other tools to access and update this information

Potential Uses

This project has potential use for the following internal tools:

Router's Ref
A central list of consultants would allow Router's Ref to react appropriately to changes in staff. In addition a groups concept would allow any member of the Desktop group, for example, to make changes to those topics which belong to, and are routed to, that group.

FaqMan
Currently FAQs exist which are owned by groups such as C&CI and Desktop. With a switch to online updating of FAQs, uwnetid authentication is required to make changes to FAQs, and it would be very useful if any logged in consultant was automatically able to make changes to FAQs owned by his/her group.

Additionally, FaqMan is currently using the Router's Ref consultants database, which contains data not designed for or exactly applicable to FAQ storage.

Scheduling Projects
Depending on the location and security of the database which the proposed projects uses, it may be useful for the coverage and hours request tools. Tools that provide for coverage requests, displaying work schedules on CSTools, and quarterly hours requests all require up-to-date lists of student staffers. (See Security section below)

Skills Inventory
The list of student staff skills currently mirrors student staff data and needs to be maintained by hand. A list of students about whom information can be stored would be useful.

QnA
In the most speculative sense, our help tracking system could make use of these lists to aid in controlling the distribution of email help requests.

This project would replace the functionality of the following resources:

• Skills Inventory employee list
• Router's Ref destinations list, also used by FaqMan
• Student Staff employees file, used by:
  • Goals
  • Coverage
  • Schedule requests
  • Timecard

Security Concerns

If any human resources data were to be kept within this tool, it would have to be located on a secure server, perhaps Daffy. However, this would make access by other, insecure tools such as Router's Ref difficult.

To avoid this problem, our current concept is that this database should be used only to store non-sensitive data (a list of employees) and individual tools will have to correlate and store additional private data on their own.

Implementation

We recommend that the database be termed as an aid to Client Services tools with an emphasis on those tools facilitating email support: Router's Ref and FaqMan.

As such, we envision it being developed on qna-dev.cac. We also see this project as an opportunity to finally migrate to a formal method by which we can locate production versions of our email support tools on qna-help.cac, as a production environment would be necessary for a more widely used tool such as the one we propose.

Next Steps

One or two people should be designated as the workforce for this project and given clearance to go ahead with a more in-depth project definition.

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