ITM 434: Business Application Implementation

Instructor Information

Sanjay Goel picture Sanjay Goel
Office: BA 310b
Hours: TH 11:30AM-1:30PM & by appt.
PH: (518) 442-4925
FX (518) 442-2568
Email: [email protected]

CLASS INFORMATION

Time:F 8:45am-11:35pm
Room:BA 233
Credit(s):3
Call #:9460

COURSE OVERVIEW

This course is a capstone course for the ITM majors where students get real world experience by working on real projects. Most of the work will be at a client site, consequently, only two regular class sessions will be held: one on the first day (August 31) and the second on the last day (December 7) where students will give a presentation. Other meetings will be scheduled via email where students. Students are expected to work eight hours each week for the entire semester at the client site. As a first step students are going to work on creating a detailed project plan in consultation with the clients with clear deliverables. Subsequently, they will work to the plan and provide weekly updates on their progress. Each weekly report will describe the activities, tasks completed, any issues that need attention, and plans for the next week.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of the class, students will:
  1. Assist in developing and editing a formal project plan
  2. Apply information technology skills to solve business problems
  3. Coordinate with external clients and work as a team
  4. Submit routine progress reports
  5. Give a presentation based on project work

RESOURCES:

There is no formal textbook for the class. Based on a specific field project, you will need to read various materials either provided by the client or by researching the Internet and the library.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

All students are expected to follow University at Albany guidelines on academic integrity (see the Academic Integrity section of the site for more detail). Whenever you come to me with a special request, think about whether your request is unfair to the other students. I am willing to do anything to help as long as I feel it will be useful to you and I make sure that it is fair to all students in the class.

PROJECTS

Students will be divided into 2-3 groups and will work on an information technology-related project. This year, the projects include:

Generating Crystal Reports- Students will be working with Crystal 10 and 11 creating custom reports from our work order system database, Maximus. Students are expected to create 3-5 highly detailed reports containing customized formals while using Facilities' templates.

Previous experience with Crystal Reports or similar reporting software will be helpful but is not required. Students will be creating small, basic reports in the beginning of the project to become familiar with the software. The basic objectives of the project include:

PHP Server Project- Students will research possible solutions to be used with our departmental web pages. We are looking to add a departmental server to aid in the recall of data to our web site, more specifically, Notable Campus Projects. Currently, our projects are typed individually on each web page and not called from a database. We would like to implement a PHP Server to drive the data into each project page. Projects can then be updated, changed, and removed at the database level rather with the HTML Code.XHTML and PHP coding experience are not required but it will help students when we set up the web pages.

DELIVERABLES

Every student must keep a journal of logged hours and what was accomplished, questions or issues that arise, and general thoughts. In addition, every week, each group is required to submit a progress report based on their project. At the end of the class, a report should be written (can include parts of all progress reports) of what happened during the project and include project screenshots and project details. A presentation must also be given at the end of the semester on the last class by each group discussing their project.

Download Fall 2007 syllabus: itm434syllabus.pdf