EVALUATION OF CAMPUS INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Evaluation of Fiji National University Campus Information Systems

Evaluation of Fiji National University Campus Information Systems

Summary

The article taken into account is “Evaluation of Fiji National University Campus Information Systems” written by Kumar, B. A. of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the Fiji National University (FNU). The article focuses on the use of Thin Client technology and discusses how this technology can be used to facilitate daily working for not only students but also for the employees of the university.

The article also reveals that before the implementation of thin client information system, the university was using three different types of information system in order to serve the needs of campus. In addition, this research also entails that the university was going through technological difficulties in terms of the performance, scalability, accessibility, etc. of existing three information systems. The paper also explains that presentation, data processing and business logic were affected due to difficulties in these three information systems.

Researcher in this paper discusses that Department of Computer Science and Information Systems developed a web-based Campus Information System (CIS) using thin client technology in order to minimise the problems associated with the integration, accessibility, performance and scalability for the users. It can be seen in this article that CIS application enabled students as well as faculty and administrative employees to conduct their everyday activities in an online environment. The most important thing to know is that the CIS application is accessible by all the student and employees of the university using both the intranet and internet.

Further, it is also important to know that, in order to assess the suitability of the CIS, this research uses three different types of evaluation systems including user interface evaluation, usability evaluation and performance evaluation. Researcher in this work believes that user satisfaction is a significant aspect that determines success and failure for any IT projects. This suggests that different evaluations are essential measures to assess the user satisfaction of newly developed CIS application.

Assessment

One of the undeniable advantages of thin client is the independence between the machine and the work environment. In fact, the session of thin client application opens when a hardware fails, office location is changed and/ or simply when an employee or student needs to connect from remote location such as home. This is the advantage of centralisation in which protocols, displays, performance is also improved at significant level. But beware, it is not possible to turn everything into a thin client with virtualisation on the desktop at this university. Some very specific items, such as very old applications requiring a hardware authentication, or requiring high performance machine (CAD, CAM), must be retained. This is why it is important to audit its fleet before the execution of this project. Similarly, the speed of deployment, updating data, system or application is important in this regard. There is no doubt about the fact that thin client infrastructure only takes a few hours to install and deploy an N version of software ...