University Admin-New Orleans


Reproduced with permission from NeXT Computer, Inc.
A Reference Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc

University Administration
University of New Orleans

Grant proposal research, administration, and management made easy with NeXTSTEP

The six administrators and support staff in Office of Research at the University of New Orleans use NeXT computers to manage all phases of research-grant administration, from determining possible sources of funding to writing grant proposals, and tracking project expenditures.

"The staff finds the NeXTSTEP graphical interface very friendly," says Wayne Patterson, director of the Office of Research. "Except for me, no one in the department was terribly experienced with computers. Before we purchased the NeXT machines, the department had one PC. We didn't keep records of any grants, except for a WordPerfect file that contained all the grant titles."

Patterson continues, "NeXTmail is an important application for us. "The staff spends a lot of time out of the office and NeXTmail makes it very easy for us to swap documents, so we can go through reviews and revisions much more quickly than we would if it were hardcopy. For example, yesterday I was in New York and when I returned today I had six e-mail messages from the associate director of the office, who is out of town today. In the past, it would have taken several days for us to catch up with one another and talk about her questions. But with NeXTmail, I was able to answer all of her questions in 5 or 10 minutes so she'll have my responses right when she returns to the office."

The department is also developing a customized software application on the NeXT machine so the staff can provide faculty members with targeted information on grants that pertain to their field of study. "Currently," says Patterson, "faculty members have to log on to the university mainframe and search through a database of 1,000 different grants. With this application, they'll be able to access targeted grant information from a NeXT machine or any UNIX shell. The department also plans to send periodic, targeted bulletins to faculty members via electronic mail as new grants pertaining to their field of study become available.

In addition, the department uses WordPerfect and FrameMaker on the NeXT machines to edit and format all grant proposals that are sent out by University of New Orleans faculty members. "We started offering this service to faculty," says Patterson, "because I did a study on our faculty's success with obtaining grants and found that the proposals that were typeset were funded at a much higher rate than those that were formatted in a standard wordprocessing environment."

"NeXT is a very easy environment to do file conversion," adds Patterson. "We get a lot of PC and Macintosh files from faculty members, who want us to edit and format their proposals. It's been very simple for us to convert them to WordPerfect or WriteNow on the NeXT."

Once faculty members receive a grant, the Office of Research also tracks their expenditures, using the Wingz spreadsheet. "The NeXT machine has helped us answer questions we've never been able to answer before," says Patterson. "For example, we can now easily and quickly calculate how much each grant recipient spends on travel and get a total."

Previously, says Patterson, the department had no method for keeping their accounting records current. "The university runs all department budgets once a month on the IBM mainframe," he explains. "Then there's a week delay until the time we receive them because they have to go through campus mail. There was always a month lag time between the university report and actual expenditures so we had no way to keep our spending records current and no idea of what faculty actually had in their accounts each day. Now, if our Fine Arts Department calls us and asks to see a record of the grants received by their faculty members during the last four years, we can make the information available to them within minutes with Wingz," says Patterson. "We can rank the grants by size, alphabetically by name of professor, by agency, by grant title, even by the largest travel budget. All the information we could need is inside the functionality of the Wingz spreadsheet on the NeXT."

For more information, please contact:

Wayne Patterson
Director of the Office of Research
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, LA 70148
(504) 286-7153