The College of Charleston is a state supported comprehensive institution providing a high quality education in the arts and sciences, education and business. Consistent with its heritage since its founding in 1770, the College retains a strong liberal arts undergraduate curriculum. Located in the heart of historic Charleston, it strives to meet the growing educational demands primarily of the LowCountry and the state and, secondarily, of the Southeast. A superior quality undergraduate program, enrolling 8000 to 9000 students, is central to the mission of the College.
 
The IS department provides administrative support to the 8000 to 9000 students and faculty in areas such as financial aid, student grades and class scheduling. During a recent conversation with CofC Systems Manager Dottie Minotti, we talked about the pivotal roll that EnterpriseSCHEDULE plays in making sure that lights out processing of jobs is carried out to the standards that this historic institution expects.

The IS staff converted over to EnterpriseSCHEDULE earlier this year after experiencing problems with their previous scheduling product. With the majority of their operations on Alpha systems running OpenVMS, they were eager to find a reliable scheduling product that could handle the lights out processing of data as well as interface with ABS (Archive BACKUP System) to provide a seamless interface to their backups. Overall, Dottie said her staff found EnterpriseSCHEDULE to be "much more powerful" than their previous scheduling system, DEC Scheduler.

Dottie said her staff found EnterpriseSCHEDULE to be "much more powerful" than their previous scheduling system, DEC Scheduler.

Dottie Minotti
College of Charleston
Systems Manager

The staff found the conversion of around 200 weekly jobs to be a fairly straightforward process with ISE Support personnel providing valuable tips and tutorials each step of the way. Before long the jobs were online and running and CofC were working with job layouts that could be altered on a daily basis, adding and removing jobs when needed. For instance, they might receive requests to create labels, build up a report or a letter and they can quickly create a job and include it into a layout. As Dottie notes "Layouts are the key to everything, they work real well"

In addition, ISE worked closely with CofC to manage and control their ABS backups that are created on the fly and fired off immediately. The operator need not interface with EnterpriseSCHEDULE as the jobs are created automatically when an ABS save or restore request is made. The job is initiated immediately and does not need to be modified by the operator. EnterpriseSCHEDULE , unbeknownst to the operator manages all of this behind the scenes.

When asked what she thought of ISE's EnterpriseSCHEDULE , she said that she and her staff have been "really happy with it". Whenever she ran into a problem, "the support staff have been quick to address it" even though there have been "very few problems". She summed up her feelings with a succint "We're happy".