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Administrative Support

Teach a Process? Do it with a Screencast

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Screencasting

Academic Personnel has a new way of rapidly training staff to use “Recruit,” UCI’s Web-based faculty hiring system. As the cornerstone for their e-learning solution, the Recruit support team, with the help of Camtasia Studio recording software, has produced a number of screencasts.

A screencast is a video that is produced by capturing motion visuals, text, and audio from a computer screen. Learners are instructed to watch the demonstration screencasts and then follow the exercises in an accompanying training workbook that they download from the site. Both the videos and the workbook reside within the Recruit system, and are reachable via the online Help after the user logs in. This self-paced training is a flexible and efficient way to help new users, or even seasoned users who have been away from the system for a while and are looking for a refresher course.

If you want to teach a computer process, consider screencasting. Your learners will be able to play, pause, and rewind whenever the need arises.

Mainframe Migrated to UCOP

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Mainframe

An intensive six-month migration process was recently completed when operations of UCI’s administrative IBM mainframe were transferred to a UCOP-managed system in Oakland.

UCI has been using an IBM mainframe for administrative processing since 1990, and the current system received its most recent hardware upgrade in 2005.  Rather than continue to invest in hardware upgrades, maintenance costs, and related expenses, it was decided the campus would receive better value by hosting its administrative applications on UCOP’s system.

The UCOP system now hosts UCI’s General Ledger, Transfer of Expense (TOE), Purchasing/Accounting Link (PAL), and other applications.  Some additional services are run on Oakland’s system, while the user interface is still provided by OIT locally, such as the Electronic Data Library (EDL) and the Permanent Budget System.

OIT remains responsible for all application administration, programming, report distribution, and printing, so UCI faculty and staff continue to be supported locally as before.

UCI is one of the first UC campuses to achieve cost-savings through the use of a “mainframe logical partition” at UCOP, along with UCSB.  Other campuses, including UCR, are in the process of a similar migration.  Cost savings are achieved through economies of scale in maintenance and software licensing.  UCI expects to save over $150,000 in FY10/11 as a result of the migration.