Again, the reports vary according to the user's input. Perl regular expressions were used to replace the user specified home institution with a canonical form. The code is quite generic, and will run on the many platforms that support Perl. The code was adapted to process the abstracts for this meeting, and the core processing software is being used in RPS2, the new Phase II proposal preparation and submission system. The pieces of this system are all held together by the public domain UNIX procmail program, a simple utility to trigger various actions via e-mail, depending on the subject line or contents of the message.
Users can request proposal templates and they are automatically sent.
Proposal submissions are automatically recognized, carefully archived, and sent off for processing. All activity was logged. Proposers and staff agree that Phase I went smoothly. A survey of 125 proposers found most users were favorably impressed with the proposal templates. There are still a few reservations about moving to paperless submission, however, most having to do with PostScript figures and the need for signatures.