garden furniture argos

first, i would like to tell you a little bitabout bluefield state. we are an hbcu, we're located in the southern part of west virginia,we have 14 accredited programs, and roughly 1,500 students. we're a small school. we have200 employees, and we graduate about 350 students a year. and the 200 employees, of course,include faculty and staff. so, we're a small shop. in it, we have less than a dozen. withthat in mind, that's all of our it. when it came to banner, which, you know, that's wherea lot of our information's at. our reporting came from just a couple of individuals. allof these offices called us on a regular basis for information. as was talked about earlier,we wrote those in different programming languages: pro*c, sql, pl/sql. and then we would putthem into banner. the problem with that was

it was very exact. it didn't give a lot ofways that you could pull the information so you could have the same information in a reportwith just a little tweaking between two offices. but they would have to have separate reports.so, we had thousands out there. then we were told about argos. i love technology. i lovetrying out new things. so i hopped right on board. and one of the nice features that thissystem gives you, is that you can build a datablock that has hundreds of different columnsin it, and it's not a on-to-one ratio. you can build 50 different reports off of onedatablock. so, with that in mind, our student support staff, they can run this report andpull the specific columns and information into a report that is formatted the exactway they want. earlier, it was talked about,

the banded reports where you have a headingat the top and then you have lists down. well, that doesn't work for most people. in fact,when i was first showing argos to our end users, their response was, "i get this withexcel. i have this. i know this is my header line, this is the information, this is mytotal at the bottom." so, in my next slide, i'll show how argos gives you the abilityto present your data in reports in a much more user-friendly manner. also, i'd like[to talk] real quick, about the report creation time. and this is not just reports, it's anythingin argos. i have gotten to the point now, when i first started as an employee with highered i did reporting with sql. i wrote my sql code, i output either a csv or my nice littletext file and i send it to them, and it took

a lot of time to code all of that. then, inmy new job, when i started there, they had me start using a program called toad. i thoughttoad was the greatest thing ever. i'd go through, quickly find things. as i'm typing, it'llactually give me suggestions on the tables. i thought that was wonderful. i can honestlysay now, after using argos, i've gotten to the point now that when somebody calls me,or puts in a work order and says, "i would like this report." i don't even think aboutthose other systems. i am immediately going into argos and writing it because, as i'mwriting it for me to produce the report, i'm also at the same time making it [so] the nexttime they want this report, they run it themselves. they no longer have to call me because i haveput in the parameters and the choices into

the form. they select them, they get theirreport, i don't hear from them again. in fact, there was a couple of them: one was for checks.we actually used argos to produce a qif file that would be loaded into quicken to processchecks. i wrote that two years ago when we first started using quicken. i haven't hearda word since. i forgot i wrote it. i actually came across it one day and they all lookedat it, and i was like, "who wrote this?" and it turns out i did. and it looks like, somehowshaking this, i moved to the next slide, so we'll go ahead and talk about it. this iswhat i mean by "you don't have to just do those loop through reports." you can designreports like this that give the pertinent information in a way that people want to seeit. argos was actually adopted, the opposite

of the earlier speech, the vice presidentsand the president were some of the first people to adopt argos. and this is why. any timethey would request information from us, we would send them the raw data, and they lookedat it and said to us, "what are we supposed to do with this?" so, then it got passed downto their assistant, down to their secretary, they'd throw it in excel, they would buildpivot tables, they would build graphs, and then send it back. that could take days. thatcould take weeks. with this, we give it to them at the push of a button. especially importantat registration. when you're at registration, you are interested in the data in real time.you want to see those graphs growing as people are registering for their courses. admissionsis the same way. we actually have a admissions

report that is sent out automatically, ona schedule, every week before our cabinet, all of our vice presidents, meet that showscomparisons between previous years and current years of people who have applied, been accepted,who've rejected us, who've registered for courses. so, they have live data with that,and they don't have to request it. it's emailed to them. also, as you can see at the top,i have several options that they can choose from. that was another thing, is that people,especially newer individuals, they were worried that they had to memorize all of these differentcodes. with argos, you can have that information pulled from your database in a readable formatfor them to just select what they need. they don't have to worry about learning all ofthis because it's there and they know what

is being pulled in a readable format. insteadof just accounting codes, you know, it'll be a three-digit number, and they don't knowwhat it is. i don't know what it is. in fact, we have some that have the same code, forsome reason. instead, they'll put the state at the beginning, so it'll be like wv050 orva050. that doesn't work for people. they're like, "well, what is that?" with this, theydon't have to worry about that. now, here is really the one i love showing. we've talkedabout reporting. we have talked about dashboards. it has been said about, "how can we use argosoutside of reporting?" and that's what i love. i love pushing things to the limit. this hasnothing to do with reporting. it has nothing, really, other than some connections to theback-end, it has nothing to do with databases.

this form, that is built in argos, controlsactive directory. this was written for our helpdesk. our helpdesk, a lot of times, isstaffed by students. students that we would have to give access to banner. we would haveto give access to active directory. we would have to give them access to the email server,and various other functions. not the greatest thing that you want your students or temporaryemployees doing. especially with a high turnover. with this system, i was able to combine allof those into a single interface. so, now when students, or faculty and staff, whenthey call, we can search for the users, verify their information, and that's the majorityof what our helpdesk calls get, we can change their passwords. all from an argos dashboard.also, "create username."- if you're a banner

school, and you use banner, and it's self-service,or if you have any kind of linking with that in a single sign-on, you've heard of the goatpadtable. there's an external user in there that's used. a new student comes in. we have a processthat runs every night. i did that because that's all they wanted. you could have itrun every five minutes, but how we do it when students are accepted to our institution,we immediately create their active directory accounts. it gives them access to our portal.it gives them access so they can easily view their financial aid, registration status,admissions status, all kinds of information. we actually send out to people that, aftertheir acceptance, we start sending all of their information through email. that hascut costs. we no longer are using postage.

we no longer have individuals that we arepaying a lot of money putting paper in envelopes, stamping them, and putting them out. so thisbecame very important because now our communication to our students is all digital. so, we needto make sure that they know how to access, or they can access, and, if they locked out,a quick way to do it. the "create new account," if they have an account, or if it's alreadybeen generated in banner, but they have not been generated in active directory, they clicka button, it goes out and creates all the information they needed. the same processis run every night. the process that, if a student really needed in right then, our helpdeskwould have to go in, create the user, put in all of the required fields. that was anothercatch is that they had to make sure they were

in the right groups. they had to make surethat their id number was in place to work with our portal system, and, of course, withnew banner xe. this does it all for them. they do not have to worry about making a mistake.this is just one example of how we are using argos as more than just a reporting tool.we are using it for application development. now, i'd like to talk about customer support.that was spoke of earlier, but one of the things, and vicky wayne, who heads up thesupport division, she has mentioned, in several of her presentations, about how, in west virginia,they started a new idea of training. we've all sat in training courses. we have our manualthat has, step-by-step, what to do, but that doesn't answer our questions. most of thetime, we don't need just the simple straightforward

training. we have very specific needs. sowhat they did with us is they started workshops. they would send a professional onto our campus.we had several different schools come together in our state with ideas of what we wantedto do. and that person was available. they were there to help us through those specificprojects. those specific ideas. so, if there was something we didn't truly understand,they were up there teaching us. another thing that i love about argos is the fact that thosesame individuals that have come down for the workshops: i have a question tomorrow afterthe workshop, a month from now, after a workshop, i have emailed them and that day i have gota response. whether it be a fix. whether it be, "hey, let's hop onto a conference calland we'll work it out." i've never had that

kind of support at any company. but for asmaller company, that is impressive. it was mentioned earlier, also, about how you cansubmit requests for enhancements. we are a small school, and to deal with a national,or international, company and to say, "we would like to see this" and to see it happen,that is unheard of. and that is the kind of support that they give. the online co-op wasmentioned earlier. that's the first thing i did. i logged on to the co-op and i justkept hitting "download." i don't see how their server stayed up because, i mean, i hit everyone of them. i have, on our tree inside of argos, i have hundreds of different reports.and i'm horrible, i have not uploaded, i promise i will. any questions? oh, there is one morething i'd like to say. i'm sorry. something

that wasn't touched on here, i don't think,in the previous presentations. the things that were shown here were the actual client,which is a windows java-based client. they also have what they call the argos web viewer.that is the tool that we push out to all of our users. our users don't use the client.they use the web viewer, and the reason for that [is] it is usable on any device. it isa web page. so, no matter if they're on a mac, linux, windows, ios, android, they logon, view all the information. i mean, we're sitting here in front of the cabinet of vicepresidents, and they pull out their ipad. they pull it up and they're like, "well isee, right now,with this graph, i see this is what it is." they're not having to go backto their computer and do a printout and bring

it back. they show it right there live ontheir tablet. so the web viewer is definitely something to look at, as well. so, now, anyquestions? [audience laughing] i promise i'm done. [applause]