Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Today USF serves more than 36,000 students, with almost 200 programs at the undergraduate, master's, specialty, and doctoral levels. In addition to its main Tampa campus, the university has a network of regional campuses in St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Lakeland. The University of South Florida had reams of student information grades, transcripts, schedules, and so on on an IBM mainframe. Relying mostly on Microsoft Visual InterDev Web development system and Microsoft Visual Basic , along with a Platinum product called InfoSession, USF developers created a Web-based interface to the administrative information for students at all the university's campuses.
Students dial into the university's Web site using a bank of hundreds of modems.
The information delivered over the Web actually resides in a CICS mainframe on the Tampa campus. For his part, Holub is working on a Web-based Travel application that will automate the process of travel requisitioning by university faculty and staff. For Web development, the tools offer the best all-around performance. Then there's the licensing advantages of the suite approach, because we also use components created in Visual Basic 5.0 and can easily integrate these into Web applications using Visual InterDev. Finally, there are additional features in the tools for working with our Microsoft SQL Server database.