Mike Little




February 6, 1996

The objective of our meeting with Mr. Little was to find out if he would be interested in backing our project, and to ask for guidance as to where we should be concentrating our efforts in order to ensure the successful adoption of ODU Online by the administration. To these ends, the meeting was a success.

We began the meeting with a brief overview of the ODU Online project, explaining our goals and the two-phased implementation plan for ODU Online. Mr. Little stated that he has wanted to do something like this over the Web for the last five years, but has not had the staff to design/maintain all the Web pages. He could not see any advantages to switching over to a separate service, as ODU is about to offer Internet access through a independent service provider, and he feels the modem/speed problems will go away. Also, PINs for security purposes already exist on the mainframe (although they are not currently used). He indicated that he would be willing to handle programming support for ODU Online, and liked the idea of the student group to handle the web pages. He said that David Kusoid (sp?) had already written some software that can go from a web page and get information off the mainframe, which we would need to do in order to access registration, grade, and financial aid information, so a lot of the "hard" part is already done. All we have to do is design the "look" and functionality of the service, and try to convince the administration to give us the green light.

When we asked who we should talk to next, Mr. Little suggested that Kathy Austin, the Controller in Financial Aid, would be able to help us sort through all the screens that the financial aid people see to find where the information that students want is buried (and how to decode it). He also suggested that if we can convince Dave Harnage and Dana Burnette that the project is a worth implementing, we would stand a much better chance. As far as what we should be working on now, Mr. Little suggested the following: