If you were looking for continuing education opportunities in eastern Alabama, you'd do well to check out the offerings from Auburn University. In addition to a wide range of courses from the Office of Professional & Continuing Education, you would also find a separate schedule of special training and certification programs at the Government & Economic Development Institute. Both organizations are ACEware customers. Interestingly enough, even though they work out of separate offices and each group has its own copy of Student Manager, they use the same web server and share a single ACEweb installation. What's more, they have plans to put up a third web site (for OLLI registrations) using that same copy of ACEweb.

Just how is the Auburn staff managing to accomplish this? By using ACEweb's alternate interface feature (AIF), which allows customers to create separate sites for a specific course group listing and/or Student Manager database. Implementation is based ACEweb's use of mapped page extensions; you'll note that on a standard AW site, all active pages end with .awp (for ACE Web Page). The alternate sites are distinguished by adding a numeric suffix (.awp1, .awp2, etc); each suffix has an associated configuration file which allows overriding the Aceweb.ini settings. That means each alternate site can have its own set of html templates, styles, and preferences. For an example, check out the dramatically different designs at these Virginia Commonwealth University sites, both running on the same AW server: Continuing & Professional Ed and Nonprofit Learning Point (though the latter is no longer active).

ACEweb customers who offer a group of courses on contract with a specific firm could set up an AIF for that firm. It would only display the designated contract courses, and could incorporate the firm's website design, so that users feel as though they are still on their company site when they go to register for courses.

One caveat: When setting up the templates for an alternate site, it's critical to ensure that all navigation bar links are consistent (i.e. pages that will be displayed on your .awp2 site should only contain links to other .awp2 pages). You don't want your users jumping back and forth between sites - it's confusing to them, and could result in users getting logged off inadvertently if the IsolateLogon option is active. This feature is used by most AIF customers to ensure that a user can't log onto one site and then register for classes on a different site without logging in again.