During this fall, some of our early applications (such as Tanner) will be used for a third time. Thankfully, they seem to be running fine with just some minor tweaks. Many more will be run for the second time, such as the hugely successful checklist. One component of the checklist is the assignment of a first year seminar and a writing class for the first years. This went through a major rewrite this year based on what we learned from the way placement was done last year. Since we retain historical data in these apps, we can analyze, re-simulate, and achieve better results.  One more that we did this year is the automated assignment of classrooms based on faculty preferences. Went extremely well and based on the feedback we receive, we will keep refining the apps. In the meantime, we keep getting a lot of requests and we are moving along…

Let us get on to email attachments! I don’t know if you are one of those who began using email before attachments were implemented in early 1990’s. I was one of them. You needed to run an external program such as BinHex on the file to be sent, copy and paste it to the text of the email. Then instruct the recipient on how to unwind it and hope they have the program that you used. Many of us also belonged to BITNET at that point in time and it provided a relatively easy way to “SHIP” a file, which was considered easier. But then came the Internet, the availability of easy to use mail clients such as Eudora and the implementation of MIME for exchanging images, files etc. These additional entities are the “Attachments”. However, technology has improved tremendously in the meantime and it is time to rethink attachments.

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