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by Brooke Bunch
What started from a
mustard-seed-sized nuisance of an unavailable phone number has
become an extraordinary information network for OU-COM staff,
faculty and students. And the best part may be that it’s still
growing.
The information network,
“InfoCOM,” was created as part of a recent Web innovation by the
Office of Information Systems & Instructional Technology. The
project, began February 2004, was officially launched in late
August after many meetings with personnel from just about every
part of the college. The InfoCOM “mark” was designed by Kari
Gunter-Seymour, communication designer.
Brian Phillips,
chief information officer, says InfoCOM can be described as a
one-stop shopping Web site, with links to personnel policies,
phone lists, addresses and even meeting minutes of the Ohio
University Senate and the OU-COM Communications Group.
“It’s a resource that provides
information on the college and on the CORE,” Phillips says. The
tech shop now ships new computers with a desktop shortcut to the
site, making it a standard of sorts.
One highlight: there is a
series of departmental organizational charts that display the
personnel of the department and the department’s hierarchy. And
the charts have a really nice pan-and-zoom feature built into
them. Neat stuff!
It all began when Phillips was
unable to locate a faculty phone number while attending a
conference. The absence of an efficient online resource pushed
Phillips and college staff to develop InfoCOM.
Through InfoCOM — located at
www.oucom.ohiou.edu/infocom/ — one can access employee
information, departmental calendars, administrative links,
online forms, publications and training materials, and more.
There are “how-to-guides” on several subjects, including, for
the technologically challenged, “how to” scan and “how to”
e-mail. And there are more of these guides to come.
Phillips says the site is an
excellent resource for faculty and staff as well as students or
anyone interested in the college. The site is available to
anyone surfing the Web, but all of the site’s contents are not.
Some parts of the site do require username-password
authentication.
And the site can change as
needs change, says Eric McFadden, technical services
specialist and one of the site’s builders. “Nancy Savage needed
more detailed
listings in
the CORE phone directory, so she and I worked together to add
it. Now she can direct people needing
CORE telephone numbers to InfoCOM instead of just sending them
an email containing CORE phone numbers,” says McFadden.
“I think it’s really cool,”
says Shelby Mullins, communication editorial associate.
“It’s a really good resource for employees, particularly for
policies. It used to be nearly impossible to find them when you
needed to quickly reference them.”
“Everybody that’s found it says
it is a great thing; and it was long overdue,” Phillips says.
“We’ve gotten great feedback so far.”
If you have feedback or a
suggestion for something to be added to the site, please contact
Jill Breeze at (740) 593-2524 or email her at
breeze@ohio.edu — so check out InfoCOM today!
- 30 -
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