NETC08 session 1042

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Session Name: A Personnel Database Management System with an import/update Function
Session Number: 1042
Location: Pinehurst
Day and Time: Wednesday, 9:30 - 10:15 am
Format: Presentation
Topic: Web Based Applications
Level: Introductory

Session Abstract:

Most organizations need some mechanism to look up people who work in the organization. In the past, we have and still do use paper for this function. However, although paper is econmical, portable, and very readable, it is difficult to update. To this end, many organizations have decided to use electronic technologies to maintain list of their employees. More and more e-mail is becoming the de-facto employee list. However, not all employees use the prescribed email system, so the email address list may not be an ideal mechanism to maintain the list of employees. Here in Texas we have developed several personnel management systems. Each has some advantages over some of the others and each has some disadvantages. I developed a personnel management system that I feel has one very strong advantage of most other internally developed personnel management systems. It is both automatically updateable from a authoritative source, and manually updatable from a web interface. The mechanism for updating the system automatically took several years to develop and is pretty flexible methodology. I call it the utility system. It is a batch-oriented multi-stage process that can handle anything from a simple edit of the incoming data or as complicated as a lookup of a value in an existing database for validation and verification. I would like to share both the process that I used to develop the system and the system itself if anyone would be interested.

Led By: Martin Rodriguez, Assistant Computer Specialist, Texas Agrilife Extension