If you are working at a university or other institution that makes use of the Luminis portal application delivered by Sungard Higher Education and you’re making use of the included Group Studio tools, you have probably noticed small a flaw with this section of the application. Luminis does not, by default, actively alert administrators when new groups have been requested by users of the system. This has been troubling for me because, in my opinion, all administrators are busy and shouldn’t have to visit the GUI of this system and have to go through multiple clicks to discover whether there are new group requests or not. If you’re like me, you would like to implement an automated notification system for use with the “Group Request Queue”.

Requirements to use this recipe:

• Luminis IV w/ Oracle Database
• Ability to access/edit cron tasks on the Luminis IV server
• Separate server that can run PHP
• PHP server must also have the OCI8 library available
  See Installing PHP and the Oracle Instant Client for Linux and Windows for more details on this.

If you meet the requirements above, you can use the PHP script below to create an automated notification system.

Steps to install/configure:

1. Download the group-request-queue.php.txt script.
2. Change the file name to “group-request-queue.php”
3. Open up the file and follow the configuration instructions at the top to configure for your environment.
4. Make note of the token text string you configured in the script.
5. Put the PHP script somewhere on your PHP server.
6. Make note of the URL that the script can be accessed at.
7. Log into your Luminis IV server via SSH
8. Edit your cron tasks and add a task such as:
   45 7 * * * /usr/sfw/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.yourschool.edu/group-request-queue.php?token=[yourtoken]

After following the steps above, your Luminis IV server will check itself daily for new group requests in the queue and automatically send emails to the site administrator(s).

File: 

group-request-queue.php_.txt