History
The idea behind AccuTrack came to life
in 1994 when Jay, one of Engineerica's
founders, was studying for his masters in Computer Engineering
at the University of Central Florida. Jay also worked
as a tutor in the Academic Resource Center. At that
time the staff of the tutoring center was spending almost
2 weeks at the end of each semester
manually tabulating usage data from sign-in sheets.
As you can guess this was a time-consuming and inefficient
process. Knowing that he has a good background in computers,
the director of the center asked Jay if he could write
a program to automate the center's data reporting process.
With assistance from his Engineerica partners, Jay designed
and wrote a sign-in program for the tutoring center.
This program was written in Clipper and ran on a 386
computer using MS DOS.
The tutoring center used this sign-in
program for a few years and it made the process of tracking
sign-ins much easier. By observing how this program
worked in a real usage situation and how students and
staff interacted with it, Jay envisioned many improvements.
In 1997 the program was re-written for Windows 95 using
MS Visual Basic and Access. The enhanced sign-in program
looked much better that its predecessor and included
new features such as the ability to report on visitors
demographics.
Shortly after developing the UCF software,
Engineerica decided to take the concept to a commercial
level, and AccuTrack was born. The
software was re-written using a professional database
development tool from Microsoft. It took several months
of hard work to create and market the new software.
Finally, in April of 1998 AccuTrack got its first customer
when the University of West Florida ordered a copy.
Other colleges and universities followed.
As more centers examined the software,
administrators from these center requested
new features. For example, Pima Community College and
Laney College introduced the appointments scheduling
module. Pima Community College also added the media
checkouts module. De Anza College ordered the staff
work-hours tracking module. The idea for the traffic
analysis module came from The University of Akron. Appointments
no-show reporting came from Loyola Marymount University.
Many other colleges and universities contributed by
giving feedback which went into improving the software.
Of course the developers also contributed with their
own ideas as well.
As a result AccuTrack grew from a simple
sign-in program to a comprehensive learning center software
that includes appointments management, traffic analysis,
demographics reporting, media checkouts, customized
surveys, staff work hours tracking, and much more. Today
hundreds of learning centers in colleges
and universities across the US and in Canada depend
on AccuTrack for collecting their data and managing
their day-to-day operations.
You can find detailed information about
AccuTrack at this web site. Of course, the best way
to know the software is to try it out yourself. This
site will also tell you how to
get your free evaluation copy to test and see what
AccuTrack can do for your center.
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