Most Innovative-Thiagarajar College of Engg, Madurai-TCENet

CENet is an ERPsystem that's been designed and developed in-house to handle the day-to-day

activities of the institute. It's completely based on Open Source software, so

the only additional cost incurred by the institute has been on hardware. TCENet

has 24 modules that covers all activities of college right from Student

Admission to Alumni Association.

TCENet is a web-based system that lets everyone in the college organize and

access information and publish various activities of the college online, all in

a familiar, browser-based environment.It has automated and integrated all

processes of the college, right from admissions to management of the alumni

association. Let's start with the admission process.

All students are registered online at the time of admission, and their

profiles and user ids are also created simultaneously. Students can then use

this user ID to access all the TCENet applications. Moreover, TCENet supports

single sign-on and central authentication, so once a student has logged in,

he/she can access all systems inside the campus and navigate to various

applications. Every student is also assigned a mail account with tce.edu domain.

Moving on, TCENet also tracks the course-wise nominal rolls of students along

with their respective timetables. Any faculty member can individually upload

assignments for students. After the students have completed their assignments,

they can upload them back into TCENet. The upload link gets disabled after the

last date of assignment submission.

	She is a Ph.D. in Computer Science, has 17 years of experience in teaching and has published over 36 Journals. She has been involved in 5 IT research projects and won over 7 awards in the field of IT.
Dr. S. Mercy Shalinie, Asstt Prof, Dept. of Comp Sc & Engg	TCENet - the enterprise wide computing framework is engineered keeping in mind the simplification of the day-to-day activities in educational institutions.

Similarly, all college circulars are posted on TCENet, so that everyone can

view them any time until their expiry date. For every circular, the target

reader can be mentioned, such as students, staff, or a particular department.

After the expiry date, the circular gets automatically deleted and unread new

circulars are differentiated from old ones by color codes. Only staff and

administrators have the privilege to compose and post the circulars.



Another interesting aspect of TCENet is that the parents of students studying in
the institute can also monitor performance of their wards boht in academic and

extra-curricular activities.

IT solution:An in-house ERP open

source solution was deployed

Impact:Employees and students of the

college can work from anywhere

Implementation Partner:



In-House

At the end of each semester, the due details of each student are displayed

when they login. These are directly picked up from the TCENet's accounts module.

TCENet also has a software forum, where students can upload their own software

like games, utilities, etc.

TCENet users can also publish their articles on the TCENet portal. Likewise,

chat and discussion forums are maintained between departments. Another key

function of TCEnet includes biometric attendance for staff using finger print

identification and smart cards. It has also integrated time and leave

management, which provides easy maintenance of staff attendance.

Placement-related details are also available on TCENet, with complete statistics

of the students' placement records with interview tips, GD tips and résumé

preparation guidelines. TCENet uses a framework which is organized into three

tiers, namely Presentation Tier, Logical Tier and Data Tier. Each layer is

deployed on separated computers on the network. Further the Logical Tier is

divided into two sub tiers--Business and Data Access Tiers, to increase

scalability and transparency. The tiers are deployed on physically separated

machines.The Core Layer of TCENet is a python package, which has a number of

classes for various jobs. Each class abstracts the job it does. The application

layers are files outside the core. These comprise the main application logic.

Overall, TCENet has made Thiagarajar College of Engineering more or less a

paper-less college. With TCENet accessible from anywhere, all the students and

employees of the college keep themselves updated all the time. Like we said,

since the software is completely Open Source, the college saves on the cost of

license fees. That's why, the institute has focused on buying the best hardware

for it.