Product Information

Brief Description

Alumni Tracker provides the ability to track alumni of a college or university for the purposes of helping to demonstrate compliance with the accreditation standards required for departments in higher education.

Alumni Tracker project area on SourceForge.net.

Detailed Description

The Alumni Tracking database is written in the PHP language, uses the MySQL database engine, and is expected to be used in the LAMP environment, though it can also be used with Windows. The current version of the application is simple and allows people to create new user names and to fill out a profile that can be updated to provide the historical information ABIT and other accreditation agencies are beginning to request. Administrators are able to generate reports from the database. The IT Department has also requested additional functionality for tracking student intern assignments. This functionality will be inserted into the Alumni Tracking database in order to provide a central site allowing students and alumni to contact each other. The Intern Tracking functionality will allow the IT Department to more effectively manage its student interns as well as the various companies and positions the companies offer. The current interface is web like with browser refreshing and other older techniques.

The Future of Alumni Tracker

The next version of the Alumni Tracking database will use Ajax to provide a smoother and more desktop application like interface. Additional capabilities that are planned to be added include broadcast messages, notices, bulletin boards, discussion groups, surveys, job postings and other alumni community types of functionality.

The Project's Purpose

Almost all of the work on the Alumni Tracking database has been done by students within the College of IT in the Information Systems Software Development Group at Georgia Southern University. One of the purposes of this specific project is to provide students with industrial experience working on the project. A second purpose of this project is to provide a useful tool to other educational organizations that may need similar capabilities.