Alumni Information Management System

Overview

This project aims at developing a space(Google Site) for hosting Alumni Information of the Institute(IIPS), which includes collecting Alumni information and processing it to be presented in a structured format. This project will be extending a step forward to bridge relations between the Institute and the Alumni associated. This will also facilitate an active Student-Alumni communication.

Why this project? A) IMPORTANCE OF ALUMNI (Relations and power of networks)

• • Alumni are much more than,

  • fundraising

  • creating professional contacts

  • getting new projects

  • Job/career networking

• They are moreover a support to the institute,

  • Alumni are the identity of the institute

  • Personal/Professional mentoring (invaluable advices)

    • Alumni are backbone to the institute

    • A positive driving force for taking institute to a new higher level.

  • Alumni may be the Role Models (Good/Bad).

  • Alumni achievements might be motivating.

• Being a big family

  • an opportunity for Alumni to give back

  • having a sense of connection

  • sharing experiences (2-way)

  • discussing problems of institute for betterment

Q) What kind of Alumni information data base was available before Dec'12 ? Is there any problem with the previous data ?

A) Previously before this project was conceptualized the data available was available in unstructured form.(Heterogeneous data -from face book, from google docs, from the pen drives of faculty members and staff -formats are different ,types and fields are different) ,Data here is unstructured because it did not follow any model, neither it fits into any relational table.Also the data available was insufficient making Alumni a weak entity (with no primary key associated) and useless sometime, so it becomes really difficult to track for any information from the data.

Conclusion- There is a need of Centralized and Unified data base

Q) What has been done to get structured data, that eliminates the above inefficiencies?

A) Having unstructured data posed problem when an Alumni-Meet was planned to be organized in Dec'12.Using this insufficient data less people could be contacted. To eliminate this problem an online registration form was linked on home page of IIPS website (http://goo.gl/s61Uu) ,this facilitated collection of Alumni Information up to a good extent. This information collected could be used further for maintaining a well organized and structured database of information with a user interactive "Alumni Information Management System". but still it is in experimental state.

Conclusion-The fields of Centralized database and various views according to users have to be finalized. Q) What are major difference between both the Alumni data information available before and after Dec'12 ? A) As you can see the two snapshots of ER representation of (clicking the given link):

(1) Old Data- http://i.imgur.com/9DiTlCk.png

(2) New Data- http://i.imgur.com/YcbSeGP.png

Conclusion-it may be possible that New data is also not sufficient .Depending upon the types of users we have to find out- Reports to be generated , and other aspects that may be useful in future.