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E-forms 2.0 – Coming Soon

Posted on: May 11th, 2011 by Al Ling

Since the launch of the current E-form system in the late 1990’s, E-forms have become a way of life at the University. Over 20,000 forms per year are routed through the system for processing of new hires, changes of positions, budget revisions, payments to external contractors and other tasks. 

While the current system has served the University community well, it is nearing the end of its useful life for both the hardware and software platforms.  With this in mind, the Office of Information Technology (IT) partnered with the offices of Human Resources (HR), Procurement Services, Vice Chancellor for Administration & Finance, Equal Opportunity & Regulatory Compliance, Provost and the Graduate School to form an ad-hoc committee tasked with the design of the next generation of E-forms.  The result of their work is a new, more robust E-form system, appropriately nicknamed ‘E-forms 2.0’.

The system was developed by Chris Provence (IT) using SAP’s WebDynpro ABAP development platform and will reside within the myOleMiss portal.   Both the UM admissions applications as well as degree audit use this same development platform.  This environment provides for a standard ‘look and feel’ across the various forms and also allows for various elements/components to be reused across each form type.  All of the form data is stored in cluster tables within the SAP production system.

Some of the new features incorporated into ‘E-forms 2.0’ include:

  • The ability to enter multiple cost assignments and specify the beginning/ending date of each assignment
  • More robust data validation
  • The ability to assign delegates for a particular user 
  • Better search capabilities for employees, vendors, cost assignments, etc.

The following classroom training sessions have been scheduled by HR and will take place in the HR Training Room.   You may register online for these sessions.

  • Monday, May 16th at 9:00 AM
  • Tuesday, May 17th 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM
  • Wednesday, May 18th  at 9:00 AM
  • Thursday, May 19th at 1:00 PM
  • Monday, May 23rd at 3:30 PM
  • Tuesday, May 24th at 11:00 AM
  • Tuesday, May 24th at 3:30 PM

Online training will also be available for those who are unable to attend the classroom training sessions.  Please contact Jessica Hughes for registration information regarding the online training sessions.

As E-form users complete the training session, they will be set up to begin using the new system.  However, the current E-form system will remain available for users to complete in-process forms and search/review historical forms.  Once all users have been migrated to the new system, IT will begin migrating all of the historical E-form data to the new system, and when the historical data migration is completed, the current system will be retired.

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