AIS Newsletter , May 2000






EDITORIAL

 

RECENT NEWS


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.

 

 


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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)



AIS HELP DESK

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)


Piece of cake!
PIE stands for People, Institutes and Experiments. The objective of the project is to provide a single coherent set of high quality data concerning Experiments, Collaboration, Institutes and People participating in these activities, to both Collaborations and the CERN central services.
(Published on 05/10/1999)


Follow me !
The Contracts Follow Up Web based application now covers the entire Purchase Procedure life cycle, from the Divisional Request, to the Market Survey, Price Enquiry, Invitation to Tender and the actual Contract...
To get an introduction to CFU, please try the CFU Quick Tour!
(Published on 30/11/1999)



On Track for LHC!
Project Progress Tracking
is a relatively new AIS application. It allows CERN experiments to easily organise and keep track of their projects, even when they involve institutes and contractors spread all over the world. Currently, this tool is being used to help the ATLAS and CMS experiments keep track of their manufacture and assembly, as well as internally for our own AIS project. This new version features e-mail report submission, export to Microsoft Project and Excel, and a full event system which lets you track branches of projects that are most important to you, and stay informed when things change!
(Published on 20/01/2000)




EDH PROJECTS

e-handling with care!
The EDH Project (Electronic Document Handling) is currently re-designing all documents from the old EDH 2.1 client-server application for use on the Web. Work is currently being done on the Shipping Request, Leave Request, Leave Overview and the List of Leaves. Also new Workflow Engine is being progressively deployed for all documents. Right now there are three documents routed in the new Workflow Engine - DAI, Material Request and TID, next will be OSVC and then all the rest. (Published on 06/03/2000)




LEAVES PROJECTS

Autumn leaves
CERN leave rules and regulations are becoming more and more complex and the current system does not always give a clear image of leave entitlement history (RSL bonus days, years of service extra days, transfers of one balance to another etc). This is why the "Leaves" projects aims to simplify the leave management system and to provide through new EDH documents a better and clearer view of leave transactions to end users. Other documents will also help part-time employees to manage their "free-time". (Published on 13/03/2000)




SALES REQUEST

Special offer!
The application is an online auction system on the Web, with which anyone having a valid AIS login id can offer equipment owned by CERN for sale.
The system has been fully integrated with the inventory system. Active or obsolete items can be picked from the division's inventory and offered for sale. Find out more (Published on 20/03/2000)



ROLES PROJECTS

Let's join the group!
This project concerns the new data structure for the registration of new structures and roles in Foundation. The old data structure of roles (for a CERN unit), profiles and signature rights was implemented for the EDH routing, and only the roles are reused by other applications. The new structure will avoid a number of problems we encounter with the maintenance, and will implement new requirements coming from applications other than EDH. (Published on 27/03/2000)




CSS PROJECT

A touch of classification
This joined AS/SPL project aims at introducing a single classification standard, thereby replacing the heterogeneous set of classification structures in use at CERN. This project was approved by LAC (Logistics Advisory Committee), the AIS priorities board, and is the result of a 6-year-old strategy to bring some coherence in the various coding systems used at CERN. The success of this project is prerequisite for many business process streamlining projects in the future (e-price inquiries, integration between purchasing system and inventory system, etc..). (Published on 03/04/2000)



PAD PROJECT

Who's next?
Did you know that the Person Administration for Divisions will replace the current ORACLE*HR user interface for divisional users. PAD should be much more adapted to user's needs and will provide a read-only person overview screen. (Published on 10/04/2000)



SUPPORT PC

PC Support
The PC Support service provides first-level support for any PC user in the administrative sector when the local expert is unavailable.
General user support is provided for standard Desktop NICE PC's for the hardware and standard software (portables are centrally supported by IT Division). Liaison with IT Division on specific support-related issues when necessary.
(Published on 04/01/2000)



SUPPORT MAC

Cool Apple fans!
Part of the Administration Information Services covers support for the many Macintosh users in the Administration. The AS, DSU, FI, HR and SPL Divisions comprise a couple of hundred Macintosh users relying heavily on the service for support which includes installation, configuration, software support, back-up, remote management and server access for storing and sharing information. For more details, please refer to our Macintosh Support pages. (Published on 15/11/1999)




BUSINESS
OBJECTS

Business as usual
Business Objects is a business intelligence tool which allows non technical users to retrieve information from our databases then analyse it through "ad-hoc" reports. Reports may be used for drill-down and multidimensional analysis. It is used at CERN by computing specialists in the administrative sector who want to provide some users set of reports which are not provided by CERN-wide tools like BHT or HRT. It is an intermediate solution for specialised services between handmade SQL's and CERN-wide solutions made for a large number of users.
(Published on 01/02/2000)