Inside this Issue
Web Services Update
Did You Know that . . . .
- The SPH web site had over 46,000 unique visitors in May, 2005?
- The average number of page views per unique visitor was 37?
- The top 3 web pages visited in the SPH website (after the SPH homepage) were the Academic Departments & Programs page, the Admissions & Students page, and the Biostatistics Department homepage?
- 2,634 unique visitors accessed our online course listings?
- 1,392 visitors viewed our "Apply Online" web page?
- The top three countries web site visitors surfed from (after the United States) were United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands?
- The top 3 web sites that referred visitors to the SPH web site are:
- All of these website usage statistics are available on the SPH Intranet.
By Patty Bradley
Patty Bradley, the SPH Web Administrator, is currently developing web-database applications for SPH Administration, Career Services, the Academic Health Department, and the Center for Risk Science and Communication. But by far her largest summer project will be transferring our existing web-database applications (such as the Faculty & Staff Directory and the Course Approval Intranet Database) to our new web-database server environment.
SPH Computing Services staff are busy upgrading the current server environment – which consists of a single web server that supports only Microsoft Access databases – to a much more robust, secure and scalable environment. We will now have a dedicated database server that supports large-scale open source database systems, as well as both a production and a development server for web-database applications. The existence of the development server will allow units to hire outside developers to create web-database applications. Additionally, the new server environment includes technologies that will allow users to accomplish a number of new things, including:
- Use the University’s Kerberos authentication scheme
- Dynamically transform web content into high-quality, printable, PDF documents
- Save web content to disk, send in e-mail or print
- Build rich, high-quality web forms that will be much more user-friendly
- Use the powerful ColdFusion Report Builder to design crisp, well-formatted reports, including charts and graphs, automatically generate subtotals and totals, and much more
- Perform better text searches against file volumes and databases
This new environment is very exciting and will result in the development of many useful web-database applications for the School of Public Health . If you have any questions about the new environment or how it might help you, please contact Patty Bradley at sph.web@umich.edu or (764) 734-0300.
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