to Software without Boosting Staff or Costs
Published: August 2003
Texas A&M University wanted to make a variety of Microsoft desktop products and tools readily available to students and staff as a result of its new Campus Agreement with Microsoft. But its two-person software store had never handled—and couldn’t envision handling—the tens of thousands of orders the university anticipated. With just a month to write an automated solution, the university turned to Microsoft .NET-connected Web services and tools. Reusing Web services created earlier—and creating new components that can be reused in the future—the university was able to sell a staggering 28,000 CDs without increasing staff or costs.
Challenge
Texas A&M University signed a Microsoft® Campus Agreement, allowing it to distribute Microsoft products including the Microsoft Windows® XP Professional operating system, Microsoft Office Professional Edition, Visual Studio® .NET integrated development environment and the FrontPage® Web site creation and publishing tool to its 44,000 students and to faculty and staff in participating Texas A&M departments and offices. The university was getting a great deal, since authorized purchasers could obtain each product for a fraction of the actual retail price.
But this led to a challenge: How to distribute tens of thousands of CDs to students, faculty and staff during the first few weeks of the academic year, when sales would be highest. The campus software licensing office had a Web site that listed the software packages available to the campus community, but the process was not automated. Its two full-time employees had their hands full with the 15,000 licenses, mostly in volume purchases, that they processed each year. Increasing the office’s customer base by more than 44,000 represented more than a 300 percent increase in workload, because they would almost all be single-license purchases. Furthermore, the software licensing office’s budget lacked the $100,000 that IT Team Leader Romona Stites estimates it would have taken to hire at least four additional staff members to handle the increased workload.
Automating the process—so that students could order their software online, rather than having to wait in actual lines—could boost student satisfaction while keeping costs low and fulfillment workloads manageable. But it was already July 1 and any solution would have to be ready to go into production by September 1. Allowing time for planning, design and testing, there would be barely four weeks to write the code.
And, to complicate matters, with most of the IT team focused on other projects, Senior IT Manager Timothy M. Chester would have to handle the entire job by himself.
Solution
With the start of the academic year as well as a newly acquired ability to offer Microsoft software to its students and faculty, Texas A&M handled the tens of thousands of new orders it received without a problem, thanks to the solution that Chester delivered.
That solution is an ASP. NET application running on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server™ with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of the Windows Server™ platform that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications. Tying the solution together and making it possible to complete on a tight timeline are XML-based Web services that link to several existing campus databases, enabling the solution not only to fit into the existing infrastructure, but also to take advantage of existing data in new ways that increase the university’s return on its technology investment.
“Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework were big parts of my being able to write and deliver a 10,000-line application in just four weeks,” says Chester. “We were able to reuse some Web services we’d already written for another application, saving about a month that we would have had to spend if we were writing code to access the mainframe without Web services. And we wanted to tie in UNIX-based Kerberos and LDAP directories. They’re notoriously difficult to program against but we just wrapped them in Web services and we didn’t have a problem.”
When students go to the software licensing office’s online store to purchase Microsoft products, they are first prompted to enter their user names and passwords. The solution, on the Windows Server, uses a Web service to check those credentials with the university’s Kerberos directory backend system. With the user names and passwords confirmed, a second Windows-based Web service goes out to the university’s LDAP directory to obtain the students’ full names and student identification numbers.
A third Web service goes out to the student information management system—hosted on a mainframe—to confirm that they are currently enrolled at the university.
Students read and agree to the licensing agreement online, select their software and make their purchases via credit card. For this purpose, the solution reuses a .NET-connected Web service originally created to enable students to pay tuition online via credit card. They then have the option to pick up their CDs in the store or have them mailed to them. For an in person pickup, store personnel access and confirm the purchase in order to hand the CD to the student. For shipping, the solution batch prints mailing labels that store personnel use to assemble orders.
All of these Web services were originally created by Chester and his colleagues for earlier applications and were simply reused for the online software-ordering system. The solution also checks its own database to confirm that the students have not already purchased the Microsoft products at the Campus Agreement price. This prevents students from purchasing multiple copies at the discounted price, and thus aids the university’s compliance with licensing requirements.
Benefits
.NET-connected Solution Makes Software Distribution Possible
“There’s simply no way we could have managed the demand for Microsoft products without the online store,” says IT Team Leader Romona Stites. “It would have been a disaster.”
Instead of a disaster, the online store sold 15,000 individual orders in one week and 28,000 individual orders in the first semester—an unprecedented number for Texas A&M. It did so without increasing staff or sacrificing service quality to its students in acquiring software.
“It was very important for us to implement this without forcing students to stand in long lines to pick up their software,” says Dr. Pierce E. Cantrell, Associate Provost for Information Technology at Texas A&M. “We wanted to give the students an experience so positive, they wouldn’t even notice it.”
And that’s what Texas A&M accomplished with the .NET-connected solution. “The best measure I have of the effectiveness of the online store is that I haven’t heard a single complaint about it,” says Dr. Pete Marchbanks, Associate Director for Customer Sales and Service at Texas A&M’s Computing & Information Services department. “If there were problems, I’d have heard about it.”
Enables Fast, Cost-Effective Development, Deployment
Beyond making software distribution a pleasant experience, the .NET-connected solution was a fast and cost-effective choice for Texas A&M. In addition to meeting the two-month deadline for design-to-deployment, the solution cost just $6,000 in developer time—compared to the estimated $100,000 that might have been needed to expand store staff to handle the sales burden manually.
“We wouldn’t have spent $100,000 of course—which means we wouldn’t have been able to provide this service to our students,” says Stites.
Positioned for Growth
Just as the reuse of existing .NET-connected software made the order and fulfillment system fast and easy to create, the reusability in the software developed is now available to expedite other development projects at Texas A&M. For example, the same Web services that check a student’s registration status to determine eligibility for purchasing Microsoft products under the Campus Agreement are now being used as part of a solution to facilitate sales and fulfillment of software for statistics department courses. If students are registered for the statistics courses and thus eligible to purchase the software at a discounted price, the automated system makes the software available to them at that lower price. If they’re not registered for the courses, they can still purchase the software—but pay a higher academic price. Store personnel don’t need to check, or even be aware of, the student’s status.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/education© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, FrontPage, the .NET logo, Visual Studio, Windows and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. /
Solutions Overview
Customer Profile
Texas A&M University is a land-grant, sea-grant and space-grant institution located in College Station, Texas. Its enrollment includes 44,000 students.
Software and Services
Microsoft® Windows® 2000
Server with Internet
Information Services 5.0 Microsoft .NET Framework
Visual Studio® .NET
development environment
“Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework were big parts of my being able to write and deliver a 10,000-line application in just four weeks. We reused Web services we’d already written, saving about a month.”
-Timothy M. Chester
Senior IT Manager
Texas A&M University
Related Links
Microsoft Server Resources for Education
www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=MSServers
Texas A&M University
www.tamu.edu