Progress 01/21/15 to 09/30/17
Outputs
Target Audience:All Land Grant Universities that currently utilize the current NIMSS reporting system. Members of the general public who wish to access public information that is stored in the NIMSS system. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Regular meetings were held with stakeholders to inform them of system changes and to determine needs for the system. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
1. The application was developed on a modern web framework and secured using industry standard techniques. Additional features and functions were developed at the request of the NIMSS management team and these features have been integrated into the application and are live for all appropriate users. 2. All projects are now indexed into search engine that allows for a much faster and more accurate search result from the system. This allows users to find projects that they are interested in much faster and will provide more accurate results
Publications
|
Progress 10/01/15 to 09/30/16
Outputs
Target Audience: Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Application code is published to the server and NIMSS staff are alerted to system changes. NIMSS disseminates this information to its users. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
(1) Maintain and enhance the effectiveness and functionality of NIMSS and access and utilization of the NIMSS database. Given that core functionality had been largely implemented in year one, improvements to the system's overall usability and functionality were made a priority over the past year. As a result, most of the system's core features were significantly modified to improve usability and function. The project and proposal creation process for instance was streamlined. Major usability improvements were also made to the sections of the system related to project participants (Appendix E), meetings, reports, reviews, messaging and user management. While these changes were wide ranging in terms of their nature and impact they were all generally focused on improving the ability of users to quickly and efficiently accomplish their goals using the system. On the whole these changes have proven successful in the sense that bug reports from the system have dropped significantly. (2) More effectively document and communicate impacts of the multistate research activities. The current version of NIMSS was initially implemented with messaging capabilities that largely mimicked those of the legacy system. One of the goals of the past year has been to provide more descriptive messaging regarding the status of work items within the system while also providing better message targeting. We believed that this improvement would have the net effect of more effectively documenting and communicating the impacts of the multistate research activities. To achieve these goals messaging has been introduce to several areas of the system where it did not exist previously in the original, legacy NIMSS (i.e. bulk messaging and reminders) and more descriptive messages have been introduced to clarify current statuses in multi step processes (i.e. project approval, review and Appendix E status messages). Message targeting has been improved as well to ensure that messages are delivered in an "as needed" fashion and not to recipients not appropriately related to the project, review, participant or work item that is the subject of the email. The net effect of these changes is an overall improvement in the documentation and communication of impacts of the multistate research activities.
Publications
|
Progress 01/21/15 to 09/30/15
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this project includes all former users of the NIMSS system. This is a very diverse group of over 13000 users that includes representatives from all Land-grant universities as well as representatives from industry and federal government employees. Aspects of this project are also available to the public through the public portal, but specific information regarding those users is not specifically tracked as no login/registration is required. Changes/Problems:The largest problem we encountered during this project related to data integrity of the legacy system. The legacy system was not consistant in its use of primary keys which resulted in errors in the new system's application code. This was not a problem that we anticipated and as such we developed our system code to be very trusting of the data. Because of this system, errors became very common. To combat this issue we were forced to recode many functions of the system to be suspicious of the incoming data and check to make sure it was indeed what was expected before moving forward. These changes have resulted in a system that functions much more efficiently and with far fewer errors. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Training for new NIMSS users and new administrators at the Agricultural Experiment Stations, through in-person, telephone, and webinar/screen sharing efforts. NIMSS system administrators provided face-to-face training and input opportunities at the National Extension and Research Administrative Officers' Conference (NERAOC) in May 2015 in San Diego, CA and will continue to offer such sessions at this meeting annually. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have been regularly reporting on the development status of the new NIMSS to the Land-grant system through quarterly NRSP1 teleconferences and presentations at regional and national meetings, such as the spring NERAOC meetings and the Fall ESS workshops. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We intend to continue to provide development support to enhancefunctions in the new system throughout the coming year. We have plans to make improvements to system emails to allow administrators to have better control of receivingmessages from the system. We will continue to identify areas that need improvement and develop functions to create a better system.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
(1) During this project we have successfully created a new, modern and secure system to replace the legacy NIMSS system. This system retains the original functionality of the legacy system and has added numerous improvements. Notably, entire projects are now indexed and searchable. User interfaces for entering project data have been redesigned and care has been taken to minimize user inputs to allow for more streamlined reporting. User management systems have also been improved. This allows NIMSS regional administrators to better manage users and protect the system from duplicate users. At the end of this project a new server was provisioned and the new application was installed and made available to all legacy NIMSS users. (2) All data entry screens have been redesigned to provide a better user experience. Replacing stragicallyformatted data entry screens with those that are more common should allow for users to more effectively document the impacts of their research activities. Also, all large lext blocks in this system employ a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) style editor. This styleof data collection very closely mimicks that of a typical modern word processor, allowing for more dynamic formatiing of entered data. An additional benefit of this type of system is that it is able to consume copied and pasted text from products like microsoft word. This makes it much easier for a user to enter the impacts of their research activities.
Publications
|
|