Webportal Applications: Automated Student Clearance Portal

Web portals are often designed to provide access to information from diverse sources in a uniform manner. This paper presents the development of a specialized portal designed to be used by graduating students to undertake clearance processes from the different departments after their studies in the university. Traditional Clearance forms are provided by university institutions to graduating students, which have to be taken in hard copy to the different offices for signing and when duly signed, confirms that the student has fulfilled all requirements and is not indebted to any of the departments or units that the student was associated with within the institution. This approach has been found to be time consuming as the students have to physically visit each office.The development of a portal based approach provides portal access to the authorized officers to access the students’ clearance page and clear the student without the student needing to visit the officer. This system is configured to send email reminders and is also interfaced with the GSM-SMS system to send alerts to both the officer required to do the clearance and the student. The portal was developed using the HTML and PHP packages while the database was implemented using the MySQL database package