These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Final Project: Download, gather, and organize data

Executive Summary
                Business description
I did my project for the company at which I work, Anglepoint.  Anglepoint is an IT consulting company, we have partnerships with EMC, Microsoft, IBM, Dolby, and a number of other large and small companies.  Our work varies with each of our clients depending on the contract.  I work on the team that focuses on our contract with EMC.  EMC is one of the world’s largest (if not the largest) high-end storage distributors.  Our job is to work with the account teams to help them to know how much of what they have sold to who, whether it is currently being supported by them, and whether or not they are up to licensing terms according to the clients usage.  EMC has made many acquisitions since its inception and then adding those databases to their already old legacy system can make for quite the process in figuring out what EMC’s client currently has and is licensed to use.  Once all the data is found, everything is verified against EMC sales orders. Our processes have improved, but even so, it can be quite the mess to get everything strait and verified so that we are providing accurate data.
                Project Overview
                We deal with many different “model families” or lines of products and each has its own process to “map” or organize the data and then to verify what we have organized, and here we are dealing with DataDomains.  DataDomain systems are for very efficient data backup utilizing specialized target-based data-deduplication solutions. This project automates the pulling of dial back data for DataDomain serial numbers from a system called Elysium.  We use Elysium and EMC sales orders in tandem to verify data we get from another database that holds general installation info called Installed Base.  Previously the process to pull the DataDomain information has been very slow because doing each serial number individually takes a lot of time and Elysium itself takes a while to load the proper information because it has to pull a lot of information from the previous dial-back (automatic report from the machine as to status of enclosures, drives, software, and other components).  In automating this process, it will still take time to complete (though not nearly as much), the person can go and work on something else (we often have an open computer or two from people that are out of the office to run programs/macros like this), and the data will be organized in a concise and easy to read manner.

Note: This project is meant to run behind a VPN, so if you try to run the program, it will fail.  I have included the output (that has been scrubbed of any sensitive data) to show what the program produces.

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