Eric Schubert
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana USA
A student sits in front of a network-connected computer somewhere on campus and starts a gopher session. After scanning the root directory choices, the student picks "Corporate Data." The gopher client prompts the student for his or her ID and password. The student receives a directory including choices for grade history and class schedule. After the student selects "class schedule," a gopher document is returned within seconds. The student reads the document and notices that a new course added minutes ago over the phone appears on the report, showing classroom building and meeting times. The student prints the class schedule and carries it away.
A department administrator wants to look at last semester's enrollment distributions. The administrator starts a gopher client at a machine in the department office, selects the same "Corporate Data" choice that the student did, and enters a unique ID and password. However, instead of seeing a gopher directory with grades or schedule choices, this directory contains twenty-five statistical report selections grouped by semester. The administrator selects a statistical report, saves it as a file on the PC, and later integrates the numbers into a word-processing document.
On November 8, 1993, Administrative Information Services (AIS), a division of the Office of University Computing (OUC), began offering a new type of client/server service which provides personalized reports using gopher. This password-protected service is a significant shift in focus for our campus gopher information system, which, in the past, focused on providing retrieval of public documents.
A ticket server is used to gain access to corporate data records at Notre Dame as part of the University's Gopher Information Service. This can be accessed from any networked system on campus which runs Gopher software. Once Gopher has been launched on a user's computer, they select the telnet Ticket Server option from the University of Notre Dame Corporate Data gopher directory, found in Notre Dame's Home Gopher Server window.
The system will then request the user's AFS id and password.
A typical public gopher server simply presents a fixed set of menu choices to any user. The corporate gopher server does not follow the typical gopher model because it constructs menus based upon user ID value provided by ticket server authentication.
The corporate gopher server presents users with menus based upon their access rights to reports and data, similar to views provided by our Andrew File System (AFS). Thus, only an employee may have access to payroll reports or the registrar can grant access to a set of student reports. Users that do not have access rights granted for specific menu choices have no menu line sent for that area. If more than one area is assigned to a user, such as "student" and "employee," a combination of menu items is sent.
Below is a list of available Gopher documents. If a user does not see the items listed below on their Gopher Menu screen, it means that access is denied to that individual on those particular set of items. Users should contact the office in question for more information about who is authorized to receive access.
This project makes good use of Internet resources while conforming to campus networking standards.
Dr. Harold Pace, University of Notre Dame Registrar, described the implementation in the following way: "Everyone who had a hand in the development of this system was excited about its introduction to the student body. We expected students to praise such an attractive new service. What actually happened was that they used it with few comments, as if it had always been there. Their response was a good one. When new technology becomes available, decide if it's helpful. If it is, make it a part of your life."
The number of documents accessed each day is growing as more students discover this method of viewing their personal corporate data. On January 16th, as an example, our corporate gopher server processed a one day total of twenty four thousand connections. This represents an increase of over 500% from the previous year. The Office of University Computing is very close to adapting this service for use with the new World-Wide-Web (WWW) service currently under development on campus which promises to further expand access to corporate data to the campus community.