VCard..what is it? How can it be used?

[mmesarch1]

Hey,
Some one just pointed out the little VCard icon in the Peoplefinder. What is it, what can it be used for, how is it populated and updated?

Could the information be pulled into a "plug-in" like the calendar to create a Faculty/Staff List for a department?

[s-jnoble6]

vCard is a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards are often attached to e-mail messages, but can be exchanged in other ways, such as on the World Wide Web. They can contain name and address information, phone numbers, URLs, logos, photographs, and even audio clips.

[mmesarch1]

OK, So is there a standard being set...at least here at UNL.
Could this be developed in to some thing like the event calendar, so that the templates could have a widget to pull that info on to a webpage for a faculty/staff directory?

[saltybeagle]

Hi Mark,

Peoplefinder can be used as a service to remotely retrieve contact information and display it on a web page.

More info is here:
http://www1.unl.edu/wdn/wiki/Peoplefinder_Services

You can pull the hcards, and change the formatting using CSS.

Right now there isn't consistent/reliable data for grouping users from a single department or organizational unit, so we can only pull individual records.

[mmesarch1]

Cool thanks Brett.

WHere does Peoplefinder get its data from? SAP? How often is it sychronized with its source?

[bbieber2]

The original source of the data depends on which record -
Faculty/Staff are from HR (SAP), Students are from Registration & Records (SIS), Retirees - Benefits office.

I believe the data is synchronized between the systems nightly. Information Services manages the data synchronization.

[rcrisler1]

A couple of things here:

As Brett notes, "right now there isn't consistent/reliable data for grouping users from a single department or organizational unit, so we can only pull individual records."

That is a data management issue that the University really needs to get its collective head around ... how to normalize database entries so that the data is useful for aggregating many records by a single factor. For example, any specific department's entries need to have the department info encoded in the same way on all records in order to pull that subset of the data - in this case, Mark's faculty list - together. It's a longstanding problem.

On a related note, does anyone want to build a seriously-scalable database of faculty information that would allow us to post CV info to the website, and to provide colleges and departments index pages of their faculty? That really seems like one of those broad-reach applications that could be of enormous benefit to the university.