Office of the University Registrar

The UW Bookstore’s popular annual feature, the customer rebate, just got easier to collect. Keeping receipts in an envelope all year is a thing of the past; now it’s as simple as swiping your UW ID card when you make a purchase.

It’s a win-win situation for the Bookstore and its customers. The Bookstore no longer has to collect, sort, and total customer receipts at the end of each fiscal year (June 30). Nor does it have to verify each student’s enrollment status. These tasks, being paper-based, required much time and effort. Customers benefit from no longer having to keep track of their receipts all year or submit them in person to the Bookstore.

The Office of the University Registrar (OUR) played a role in this process improvement, which launched at the beginning of July. The Bookstore had approached the OUR with an idea to automate the verification of a students’ enrollment status. Soon afterward, the OUR had developed, tested, and deployed a process that enabled the change. It’s always a pleasure to see this sort of collaboration between University groups result in significant improvement for all stakeholders.

More information on the UW Bookstore’s customer rebate.

The UW is a big university, but it can fit in your hand. At least, it will soon; the University’s first official iPhone application will be released in Sept.

Excitement over the “Mobile UW” application (commonly called an “app”) is growing. Evidence of that fact can be seen in the more than 500 entries in just three days by the University community in the “name-the-app” contest. The free app should have quite an audience when it becomes available. Usage statistics show that iPhones or iPod Touches comprise over 30% of devices on the UW’s wireless network. (And that data was from Sept. 2008; with the popularity of the latest iPhone model, released last month, that percentage may be even higher.) Those using non-Apple mobile devices won’t be left out in the cold, of course. A mobile-optimized website containing much of the same information will launch shortly afterward.

The app will bring UW news, sports headlines and game updates, campus map, and course catalog information together under a unified interface. The data behind these features are the real stars of the show, however. Writing, testing, and deploying the additional resources in the Student Web Services necessary for the app is a major achievement accomplished in very short order. The Office of the University Registrar (OUR) would like to congratulate and thank our partners in the Office of Information Management for their efforts of those bringing this project to fruition.

July 1 marked the beginning of a new fiscal year. It makes sense, then, that Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta College chose that day to launch the Kuali Financial System (KFS) on their campuses.

The adoption of the Kuali’s financial system by other universities is a major milestone for Kuali, a consortium of community-source enterprise system projects working to bring next-generation capability to all aspects of higher-education management. The University of Washington is currently conducting the Financial Systems Needs Assessment (FSNA) project, and KFS is among the list of solutions that will be assessed as that project moves into soluition evaluation in the coming year.

The UW is playing a significant role in the development of Kuali Student and Kuali Rice systems, so the Office of the University Registrar pays special attention to achievements like this one. We’ve detailed Kuali’s progress on this blog in order to keep the UW community abreast of a set of software tools that may power our own information systems some day.

Extras: Read an open letter to the Kuali community from Patrick J. Burns and Allison Dineen, Vice Presidents for IT and Finance at Colorado State University, or a similar open letter from Dr. Jon C. Stephens, Vice President of Business Services at San Joaquin Delta College. You can get more background on the topic of open- and community-source software in higher education in this article on Kuali at Inside Higher Ed.