* A description of the Federal government's A-21 requirements -- principles for determining costs applicable to Federal grants, contracts, and other agreements -- and how ADAPT will be incorporating them into the new chart of accounts is now available on the ADAPT web page.

* Project ADAPT is hard at work in the planning stage for phases III (grants management, accounts receivable, fixed assets) and IV (payroll, personnel, benefits) of the project. Stay tuned to the ADAPT general information e-mail list, our web site, and future issues of this newsletter, which will provide more information about this planning as soon as it is available.

* ADAPT has completed a design for the ''architecture'' of Harvard's technical systems, which refers to the definition of ADAPT's underlying computer, network, and software components-and how they relate to each other. The technical architecture addresses such matters as the required storage capacity and speed for the computer ''servers'' that store financial information, how a user's desktop computer interacts with those servers, how network and data security is maintained, and myriad other details. The architecture is designed so as to maximize system performance (for example, how quickly the system responds to a user's action), ensure uninterrupted availability (the system does not ''go down''), and protect against loss or unauthorized disclosure of information. Look for a summary of the results on ADAPT's web page later in March.

* Working with a committee consisting of university representatives, ADAPT has selected RWD Technologies Inc., a firm specializing in training and performance support for enterprise-wide technology implementations, to assess Harvard's ADAPT-related training needs.

Based on a successful conclusion of this initial work, ADAPT will utilize RWD Technologies as its primary external resource for training support in Phase II of the project.

 

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Copyright 1998 President and Fellows of Harvard College