MyIU/EDEN: A Brief Overview

Rosemary Pleva

MyIU/EDEN is the transaction processing environment currently under development at Indiana University. It is designed to provide faculty, staff, and students access to appropriate administrative systems through a common interface and allow the university to replace its paper forms with their electronic equivalents. Eventually, MyIU/EDEN hopes to provide access to enterprise-wide systems like the Financial Information System (FIS), Human Resource Management System (HRMS), Purchasing, Student Information System (SIS), Travel, and Facilities (MMS).

MyIU is the user interface and is similar to portals like My Yahoo! EDEN is the infrastructure that will allow various applications to "hook into" MyIU. EDEN will include a workflow engine that will handle the routing and approval for all electronic documents that pass through the transaction processing environment. Other applications included in the EDEN infrastructure are document creation, security, and information retrieval.

In the MyIU/EDEN environment, electronic documents are created by business transactions, such as the activity of dropping a class or hiring an employee. These documents are then routed and approved as necessary. Bringing these actions together in one environment allows users to perform a variety of transactions in one place and provides a common methodology for accessing the university’s diverse administrative systems.

The IU Electronic Records project staff have been working closely with some of the MyIU/EDEN development teams as they gather both the functional and technical requirements from the system application areas mentioned above. We have been helping define the necessary recordkeeping requirements, particularly in ensuring the integrity and authenticity of records in the document creation and workflow processes. We have also discussed with them requirements that will capture documents and transfer them into a recordkeeping system. These requirements will most likely be implemented as part of Phase II. Phase I requirements gathering is almost complete and the design process will begin in the next few months. Implementation of Phase I is expected by mid-summer 2001.