About B.R.I.T.E.
B.R.I.T.E. (Business Reporting and Intelligence Tool for Educaction), originally known as MU BRITE, was begun as a home-grown Web product in 2004 whose goal was to simply provide access to data related to student and faculty information that is currently found in Sungard Banner&tm;, a product that Marshall University licenses for its student information system, through a web-accessible interface. The site consisted of custom created reports for academic and administrative units alike that can be bookmarked, exported to Excel, and customized to view real-time university-related data that is pertinent to a particular individual or group for planning, trending, or academic analysis. The project was created in coordination with Marshall University's Office of Academic Affairs to provide a common web-accessible interface for faculty, record keepers, deans, and upper-level administrators for the retrieval of data in easy-to-use formats from the SIS. Prior to this site, all data requests were given to Computing Services who would have to write custom routines for the pulling of data from Banner for each individual access request, placing an extra burden on an already understaffed IT department. Many times these ad hoc requests were put in too late for the data to be retrieved before it was needed. The creation of this application provided a set of data reports to individuals on a permanent, but real-time basis, in a consistent interface without having to go through the SIS's often times confusing and non user-friendly GUI itself. The project was started as a proof-of-concept idea by the creator to see if such a product would be viable and used alongside the current student information system. Today, B.R.I.T.E. is an ever-evolving tool which provides access to data in an easy to use web delivered format. The reports that were originally included within MU BRITE were done so under the direction of a committee lead by Academic Affairs that reviewed and approved report creation and access to the system. B.R.I.T.E. was designed and developed by a faculty member in Marshall University's Integrated Science and Technology Department. Originally, B.R.I.T.E. was built with a variety of technologies, including Oracle, mySQL, and PHP. Today, refinement of the software includes a 3-tiered web architecture built with PHP, Oracle, and jQuery.