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Effort Administrator^tm

Technical Architecture

Overview

Effort Administrator is a scalable, web-enabled application that can be economically implemented as either a turn key solution or customizable system for use within an institution with complex technical and /or organizational structures. In either case, IT Works implementation specialists will work with you to plan and configure your implementation. If customizations are required, IT Works software developers will create the software modifications needed to ensure that Effort Administrator will operate successfully within the technical environment of your institution.

Effort Administrator has been developed with state of the art software technologies to enable integration with institutions using the most advanced financial and HR management systems, to insure product longevity, and meet the challenges facing research administrators both today and tomorrow.

Application Architecture

Effort Administrator is a .NET, web based client server application composed of two servers and a number of client workstations that is designed to interface to your institutions internal and other third party systems. Examples of these systems include industry standard GL, HR, payroll, financial, and grant management systems. While interfaces between the Effort Administrator and institutional internal systems vary, the end product is an electronic implementation of the institutions unique certification methodology.

The Effort Administrator client provides users with information relevant to their security clearance and role within their institution. The client workstation utilizes a Silverlight, in-browser interface that communicates with a .NET application installed on a Windows server using IIS. The .NET application on the Windows server interfaces to a relational database server that stores the time and effort application data. The time and effort data may be manually entered through the client workstation or electronically retrieved from your institution’s internal and other third party systems via the previously described interface.

Reporting Architecture

Effort Administrator provides reports for research administrators as well as certified effort statements for faculty, principal investigators, and research staff. Reports for administrators are generated from a browser based report and criteria selection form on their workstation. The selection form makes reporting simple, requiring just two actions from the user. With the first action, the user defines the data to be selected for display in the report. Users may define data by date ranges, individual or groups of employees, or individual or groups of funding sources. Types of data reported include financial, payroll, HR, actual effort, committed effort, cost shared effort, and more.

Through a second action, the user picks the appropriate report format or layout. Numerous pre-defined and user-defined formats are available for display, export, or printing. Reports can be exported in standard file formats including PDF, Excel, text, Word, and MHTML. Examples of formats vary but tend to be either summary or transactional in nature and sort either by employee or funding source.

Faculty, principal investigators, and research staff generate certified effort statements via a single button press on a browser based time and effort display form.

In terms of a more technical description of the reporting process, the Silverlight client on the workstation initiates the report generation process based on user actions. The user’s action defines how data is selected from the database server using NHibernate generated SQL queries and compiled into an object data source that is made available to a report viewer. The report viewer formats and provides data to the user by the browser. As previously stated, numerous report formats can be made available for display, exporting, or printing.

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