Lincoln Center Institute
Spring 2005: Andornot has recently upgraded our schools
online ordering project for the Lincoln Center Institute in New York.
Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) is an arts and education organization
whose approach is based on aesthetic education and the writings of such
innovators as John Dewey and Maxine Greene. The Institute works in
partnership with pre-K through grade twelve educators and
degree-granting teacher education programs, and provides numerous
professional development opportunities.
LCI, a national leader in arts and education, has been a model for
organizations across the nation and abroad. Since its inception it has
served over 2.7 million students and some 50,000 educators.
In past years, when Spring came around, LCI would prepare and mail out a
hard copy annotated catalog of resource materials to support the
Institute's work in their Focus Schools and Teacher Education
collaboratives. Resource co-ordinators at these schools would then have
2 months to place their orders for delivery by the time the new school
year started in the Fall. LCI staff worked with emails, faxes, Excel
spreadsheets etc. to manage the ordering process for multiple titles for
20 or so different schools within this tight timeframe.
In early 2004 Andornot designed an online ordering system using
WebPublisher PRO to streamline and enhance this workflow. For the first
time, school resource co-ordinators were able to log in to search a web
based catalog for works on a specific repertory, or by format, audience
level etc. and then place selections in their shopping cart. They were
able to see at a glance the total amount of their order, how much they
had left in their budget, and could add and remove items until they were
satisfied with their selections. Once they submitted their order, their
school colleagues were able to view items ordered, along with item order
status, to plan their programs for the upcoming year. Open access to the
catalog for the general public was simultaneously maintained. See
http://www.lcicollections.org/.
This year, 2005, Andornot was commissioned to further enhance the
system. A wishlist feature has been added, allowing teachers and
teaching artists to identify catalog items as desirable as they browse
the catalog. The resource coordinator sees all wishlist requests with
attached comments, and can immediately transfer the request to the
school's order cart.
Behind the scenes, linked DB/TextWorks databases keep track of the
catalog, schools, suppliers and of course the orders themselves.
Purchase orders are emailed to vendors from within DB/TextWorks, and the
status of the order is updated as each item is received and sent out to
the schools. This information is then immediately available via the web
interface for schools to track the status of their orders.
Also, of interest to developers, this year the entire project was
upgraded to use the Andornot WebPublisher Results Control. The
WebPublisher Results Control allows us to contain all HTML results
generated by WebPublisher within a .NET environment, giving us
programmatic control over content and behaviour of WebPublisher results
before they leave the server, but without resorting to ODBC or SOAP so
all native WebPublisher functionality is retained. For the LCI project,
this meant all the original forms designed within the catalog database
continued to be used, but we were now able to programmatically
manipulate "add to cart" and "add to wishlist" features based on both
record content and user login role, server-side. We thus were able to
simultaneously increase the muscle power of the LCI application while
reducing time-to-complete. The WebPublisher Results Control is part of
the Andornot WebPublisher Developer Kit.
The schools online ordering project is one of two that Andornot has
created for the Lincoln Center Institute. An interface to the
Pforzheimer/LCI Catalog of the resource collection at the Heckscher
Foundation Resource Center of the Lincoln Center Institute can be seen
at
http://www.lcicat.org/.
Contact Andornot for more
information on our shopping/request carts, and the WebPublisher
Developer Kit.
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