Project Abstract

Project Overview

<p> </p><p>INTRODUCTION<br>1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY<br>Virtually all software used in enterprises today has the same goal which is<br>supporting business processes. Some processes are entirely automated, relying<br>solely on communication among applications, others probably rely on people to<br>initiate the process, approve documents the process uses and resolve any<br>exceptional situations that arise like incomplete information. In either case, it’s<br>often possible to specify a discrete series of steps known as workflow that describe<br>the activities of the people and software involved in the process. Once this<br>workflow has been defined, an application can be built around that definition to<br>support the business process.<br>An office management is a set of activities organized hierarchically in a tree<br>structure. An office management consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a<br>depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of<br>persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.<br>Office management may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in<br>work share, work split or other types of ordering. For control purposes, it may be a<br>view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of<br>actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being<br>transferred from one step to another.<br>2<br>An office management system is a model to represent real work for further<br>assessment, e.g. for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More<br>abstractly, an office management is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic<br>organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flow, into a<br>work process that can be documented and learned. Offices are designed to achieve<br>processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision,<br>or information processing.<br>Office management concepts are closely related to other concepts used to describe<br>organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and<br>hierarchies. Office management may be viewed as one primitive building block of<br>organizations.<br>The term office management is used in computer programming to capture and<br>develop human-to-machine interaction. An office management software aims to<br>provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processing<br>of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without the need to understand<br>computers or programming.<br>An activity represents an action in an office. It can be a complete activity that<br>consists of several child activities. An activity can be sequential which means that<br>the order of its action is specified at design time or the activity can be event driven<br>which means that the order of its action is determined at run time in response to<br>external events.<br>Windows office management foundation is a Microsoft technology for defining,<br>executing and managing offices. Windows office management foundation includes<br>a default set of activities that provide functionality for control flow, conditions,<br>event handling, state management and communicating with applications and<br>3<br>services. Windows office management foundation also provides an extensible<br>model and designer to build custom activities that encapsulate office functionality<br>for end users or for reuse across multiple properties.<br>Windows office management foundation comes with a programming model, a<br>rehostable and customizable office management engine and tools for quickly<br>building office management application on windows. It can be used to enable<br>workflow within line of business application, user interface page flows, document<br>centric workflows, human workflows, composite workflow for service oriented<br>applications, business rule-driven workflows and workflow for system<br>management. It has the ability to monitor a running office activities, examining it’s<br>execution in real time. Every office management system contains some number of<br>activities, each of which performs some aspect of that workflows function. Office<br>management acts as a container for these activities, providing a way to control<br>their lifecycles and order of execution. Windows office management foundation<br>aspires to support both system workflow and human office management in a<br>unified fashion. System office management tend to execute activities in a well<br>defined, predictable ways, while human office management do not. To address<br>both of these requirements, windows office management foundation provides two<br>built-in office management types: sequential office management capable of<br>executing activities in a predefined pattern and state machine office management<br>capable of responding to external events as they occur.<br>Using office management system to automate students’ registration process<br>is very necessary because of the flexibility and convenience it will offer both to the<br>institution and students. This research work when implemented will make it<br>possible for students to do their registration electronically on the institution’s<br>website. The workflow management system will then keep track of the student’s<br>4<br>registration process from one department of the institution to the other until the<br>registration process is completed. It will also give the student feedback anytime the<br>student log on to the school’s website to know his or her registration status. The<br>workflow will also create automatic database for the storage of the student’s<br>electronic form.<br>1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM<br>The current student’s registration process of Obasanjo collage of health sciences<br>which is based on manual registration process is characterized by lack of integrity,<br>concurrency problem and the inability of student’s to process their registration<br>online from any place.<br>The current manual registration process exposes the system to lack of security of<br>information thereby making the student’s information to be exposed to<br>unauthorized users.<br>Lack of a good database for student’s forms exposes their files to the dangers of<br>fire outbreak and flooding.<br>With the current system, student’s who have not paid their school fees can easily<br>photocopy the forms from others and do their registration.<br>The current system does not support online registration which makes it mandatory<br>for the student to do their registration within the school and this involves the<br>transfer of this forms from hand to hand for approval and distribution for manual<br>storage. Therefore the proposed system which is web-based will address the<br>problems of insecurity, loss of document and delays in the student registration<br>process.<br>1.3 OBJECTIVE OF STUDY<br>5<br>The purpose of this research work is to develop a system that should be able to<br>achieve the following:<br>1. Automation of the student’s registrationprocess by changing all hard<br>copy procedures involved to electronic media.<br>2. Provision of a robust database for the electronic storage of registered<br>students’ data and at the same time reducing the number of stand<br>alone databases.<br>3. Generation of students’ registration number after the student have<br>been duly cleared.<br>4. The use of office management to create a process that can help in<br>routing, approval, tracking and scheduling of activities involved in the<br>registration process.<br>5. Using office management system to notify students of their<br>registration status anytime they log in on the site.<br>6. Providede password to prevent unauthorized users from accessing and<br>manipulating information.<br>1.4.SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY<br>Using office management to automate and keep track of the student’s registration<br>process will eliminate the problems associated with the current manual student’s<br>registration process which includes but are not limited to lack of information<br>integrity, concurrency problem and lack of data security.<br>This project when implemented provides a common office management<br>technology for windows which makes it possible and easier to implement a<br>registration process that can rely on multiple windows applications.<br>6<br>It can also offer an office management framework for diverse applications that will<br>allow the student’s registration process to be hosted in any environment and also to<br>be customized for any environment.<br>Again, it can unify the system and human office management involved in the<br>student’s registration process. This will also provide support for delay in the<br>registration process which will provide the ability to modify a running office<br>management.<br>1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY<br>The scope of this research work is centered on the registration process of the<br>students of Obasanjo collage of health science makurdi, Benue state. This<br>project which is web-based, automates the student’s registration process, generates<br>students registration number, monitors the movement of the electronic form online,<br>notify students of their registration status anytime they log onto the school’s<br>website and also maintains the integrity of the information being processed by<br>using password to limit access to only approved individuals. The system also<br>creates automatic database for the storage of successfully registered students<br>1.6 LIMITATIONS OF STUDY<br>Due to time constraint and limited resources, the use of biometric could not be<br>incorporated into the work for authentic identification of real students as well as<br>incorporating text message alert facilities.<br>1.7 DEFINITION OF TERMS<br>Activities are the fundamental building blocks of workflows. An activity<br>represents an event in a workflow. An activity can be sequential which means that<br>7<br>the order of its action is specified at design time or event driven which means that<br>the order of its execution is determined at run time in response to external events.<br>Workflow: According to the Workflow Management Coalition glossary (1996)<br>workflow is defined as the automation of a business process, in whole or part,<br>during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to<br>another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.<br>Office Management System: According toFischer and Layna (1999) it is a system<br>that defines, creates and manages the execution of office management through the<br>use of software, running on one or more workflow engines, which is able to<br>interpret the process definition, interact with office management participants and,<br>where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications.<br>Web-Based System: K.M. Hussain and D.S. Hussain (1997) opined that the term<br>Web-Based system refers to those applications or services that are resident on a<br>server thatcan be accessible using a Web browser and is therefore accessible from<br>anywhere in the world via the Web.<br>Internet: Behrouz and Chung (2004) in their book defined internet asa global<br>system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite<br>(TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. They further opined that It is a<br>network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic,<br>business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a<br>broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies. According to them,<br>internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably, the<br>8<br>inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the<br>infrastructure to support electronic mail.<br>World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as The Web, is a<br>system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet as noted by<br>Sanjay Sharma (2006). With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain<br>text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using<br>hyperlinks.<br>JAVA.<br>Java is a fully computational object-oriented language. As such, it is a suitable<br>vehicle for conventional standalone programs or applications, which is the main<br>use of the language today.<br>Java is also a multithreaded language and this feature makes it a highly scale<br>able language for programs that execute on web server. Consequently, in recent<br>years there have been increasing use of java for server SID, or servlet<br>programming.<br>With many programming languages, compilation produces machine code.<br>Each platform will have its own machine specific code, so a program compiled on<br>one platform will need to be recompiled on another before it can be ran. Java byte<br>code is an intermediate code between source code and machine code. The byte<br>code can be ran by any java interpreter that conforms to the java virtual machine<br>(JVM) specification. A JVM can be standalone interpreter or embedded in a<br>browser or electronic device. Java is case sensitive, using PUBLIC instead of<br>public, for example will be rejected by the compiler.</p><div><div></div></div><br> <br><p></p>