To: web-walkers@gibbs.oit.unc.edu
Cc: loonsk@med.unc.edu
Subject: Summary of November 29 presentation: School of Medicine
To Web-Walkers:
Summary of November 29 special presentation on the School of Medicine's innovative use of Web tools, by John Sharo
Thanks to John and also to Bob Schreiner for arranging for this presentation.
John described and showed several aspects of the School of Medicines's Web service at http://www.med.unc.edu/. While many resources are publically available, access to several areas is restricted. Rather than having to deal with additional userids and passwords, the Web server (Cern server) was modified to check the Unix system accounts that people at the Med. School already have.
The Events section is a Bulletin Board system. Rights to post to it are disseminated. Posting uses HTML forms; and events expire automatically.
The departments and offices section has icons showing whether or not the group has a home page, mailto, and/or faculty/staff section; the latter links to personal home pages, which can reside on a different server; lists of people are aggregated.
There is a developers page that lets the information provider set up an O drive; there is a help app that uses a Novell server which maps the O drive to a UNIX server. Word for Windows with the Internet Assistant is available. They are launching PC applications off of a WWW-based menu. There is an images database. This section is used in conjunction with an education effort for depatments.
The server recognizes the browser and varies the display by machine type/user (it knows who the user is from the authentication).
The service lauches some legacy systems that require telnetting, but the login is done automatically.
The system has searching capabilities.
Services are provided to support students. There is problem tracking; particularly for students out in the field; Bulletin Board discussion on patients and diseases -- discussion lists with clickable URLs.
Attendees: There were about 60 attendees.
To the UNC Home Page