Limit Horizon tending to Zenith !!!

(This post would be understood better if you are a student, faculty, or in an obvious way related to SASTRA University)

Time: 13:00 hrs

Venue: Hostel room(on bed, sleeping on Data Structures book with the end semester exam the following day)

“I’ll be there for you……..”, (my ring tone then), “Dwarakanath calling..”. I picked the phone, and not even in my wildest dreams did I expect that this call was what would start off the “thing” that would define the whole of my next semester in college.

Well, as “history” (Ah! That sounds important!) would have it, this is how it all began for us, three 3^rd year(then 2^nd year) students from the School of Computing. The result is what we see as the Students Toolkit today.

A wonderful new idea, and the thought of creating something that the whole university would use once successfully completed was enough to get the team all enthusiastic and raring to go. What followed of course, was some intense bonding with the laptop, a lot of learning(A LOT LOT LOT!!!), meetings, deadlines, long hours at the lab, erroneous codes, disagreements, approvals, tense demonstrations, a few sleepless nights, and a few sighs of relief, and at last a lot of smiles. In short it was an ineffable experience.

The Student Toolkit (as most of you may know by now) is an application that caters to many different categories of users - students, alumni, faculty and outsiders. It provides different services to each user group, identifying their needs and requirements. The services include applications for new ID cards, bonafide certificates, transcripts, and most importantly (for most) hostel leave permissions. Apart from these, it also includes modules such as curricula (coming up) to check out your syllabus and other details, notifications, to get all alerts, et cetera. With everything now just a few clicks away, with the comforts of your bed, it would not be completely inappropriate to cite that the Toolkit has indeed taken a leap towards making SASTRA a paper free University.

Now that the project is in the post-deployment phase, I have to confess that this project has contributed majorly to an extremely exciting and fun-filled 4^th semester in college. I would be leaving a huge blank unfilled if I, (and am sure my teammates would agree), do not express my gratitude to Prof. VaidhyaSubramanium, Dwarakanath (Open Source Champion’10 at SASTRA), and GLOSS for providing us with this wonderful opportunity and give us a learning experience better than any other.

To conclude technically, the Toolkit has been a GOLSS initiative, built completely on Open Source Softwares, with a base of PHP and MySql. It can be viewed at toolkit.sastra.edu.

PS: For any comments, criticisms (except, “I hate you for making hostel permission count more strict!”), and queries, feel free to contact us at toolkit@sastra.edu.