AIS Newsletter , May 2000

A new millennium began

Last year has been a very busy year for the Administrative Information Services of our division. Everybody knows about the Y2K bug: just like most other services all around the world, our preparatory works avoided all service disruptions which CERN could have otherwise suffered. I wish here to thank all people who worked on these issues in our division as well as all other administrative divisions. And I would also like to thank you, our users, for your patience with us: most of our work has been quite invisible to the user community at large in the last year, but I take this occasion to reassure you about our continued commitment to help you perform your administrative tasks.

To this effect, we want to increase our communications with you and provide a variety of channels to inform about our work, but also to be informed of your needs and expectations. This newsletter will be a key part of those channels.

Last October we put in production our completely new Web site, we have structured the site based on the functions provided to you, rather than on our internal hierarchical structure, this to help you find the information you may need. A great wealth of information has been provided by all our teams and we invite you to visit the site and let us know what you think about it.

You can find on the right various interesting information about our applications which appeared on our web site since last October: the various links will bring you directly to many pages you may or may not already know. Please explore the ones interesting to you.

Achille Petrilli
Deputy Division Leader

A newsletter, why ?

You may wonder why, given that "everything is on the Web": well, I personally do not look regularly to Web sites not directly related to my work and I guess many of you do like me.

Instead I appreciate e-newsletters: the information comes to me directly and I can decide whether something is relevant or not. This e-newsletter (yes, we are not going to print it, but you can if you want to) wants to be exactly that for you: a periodical reminder of what has happened and what is going to happen in our work which sooner or later will have implication on your professional life as well.

We are trying to limit the effort needed to produce this newsletter to a strict minimum by reusing some other information which appeared or will appear as well on our Web site: in a sense we are trying to send you a whole series of keys which allow you to jump into our Web site whenever you spot something which interests you for your own needs.

Another reason to limit the effort needed is to guarantee we will manage in the future to keep editing it.

We are planning to publish the newsletter in English only, at least for the time being. The intended frequency of the newsletter is 3 issues a year. We will review this based on your feedback.

We also commit ourselves to use your subscribed e-mail for the newsletter and related matters only.

We value your feedback and would like to know what you think about this initiative and the newsletter in particular. We will reply to all feedback received either personally or via the next issue for the most general questions.

Obviously you can contact us in French or English as you prefer. You may already receive a lot of e-mail and may not be willing to increase your load with this newsletter. We produced this initial distribution list from our databases, choosing a mix of regular users of our applications as well as people who have contacted our helpdesk in the last two months but excluding external users.

We have compiled the initial distribution list for the newsletter to include all of the Administration plus users who have contacted us via the helpdesk or who have recently logged in our applications. This is the only issue you will get unless you subscribe. If you want to be added to our distribution list, just click on the Subscribe button on top of this page.

In any case feel free to forward this e-mail to colleagues who may be interested, they will be able to subscribe by filling in their e-mail address and clicking the Subscribe button.

Achille Petrilli

DISCUSSIONS

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This might be an opportunity for interactivity. If we receive enough comments from you, we could publish them in our Newsletter and this way you can also find out what your colleagues have to say.

READER SURVEY

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What is AIS?
AIS is the combination of activities provided by three groups in AS division:

• AS-CIS: Corporate Information Systems
• AS-IDS: Internet Development Services
• AS-SAS: Systems and Application Services
  

Who is behind AIS?
Have a look at our Organisational chart.
What do we do?
Our main objective is to provide CERN with a set of integrated and reliable Administrative Information Systems.
The AIS Business map gives a view of the AIS coverage of Administrative Business Process. (Published on 10/02/2000)

5000 questions per year!
As our user base involves potentially the whole of CERN, and now also includes many external collaborating users, we offer support for all of our AIS Applications and Services via the AIS Helpdesk. Please don't hesitate to contact us at ais.support@cern.ch or telephone (+41 22 76)79933. (Published on 19/10/1999)

EDH : an electronic signature every 20 seconds!
EDH stands for Electronic Document Handling. EDH is an application widely used at CERN, by over 2000 users per day. EDH simplifies the creation of many administrative and financial documents. You can find detailed documentation for documents such as the Leave Request, Training Request, Shipping Request, Purchase Order - DAI, Material Request, Transaction Inter Divisionaire - TID and others. EDH is in a transition period, moving from the EDH 2.1 client-server version to the Web. This makes EDH accessible from outside CERN with a minimum requirement which is a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer) version 4 or higher. After sending your document, the EDH Workflow Manager will automatically determine who needs to approve your document, and then forward it to them for their electronic signature. A new Workflow Manager based on a standard solution from ORACLE is being phased in. (Published on 02/11/1999)

ORIAC: 1'000'000 financial transactions per year!
ORIAC is dedicated to managers in charge of administrative and financial services. ORIAC at CERN is used by specialists from Finance Division. This application is in production since the 1st of January 1992. A new version of the application using a web based interface is being developed and will be introduced in 2000 or early 2001. (Published on 18/02/2000)