Volunteer Projects

Mary Gammel volunteers at St. Francis High School in Wheaton and at the Wheaton Chamber of Commerce. As a volunteer, she likes to use her business and technical background to manage and work on projects.

 

Mary encourages all business owners to get involved in their communities. It's a great way to network, prove your expertise, and increase name recognition.

St. Francis High School

At St. Francis, Mary works behind the scenes in the technology department. In fact, Quality Web Site Testing's test bed computer was built by students at St. Francis under Mary's supervision.

 

In 2008, Mary programmed a Perl script to consolidate and analyze spam report emails sent by the school's Barracuda spam filter. By running the script on a batch of emails, the system administrator can analyze less data then cut and paste the script's output files into the Barracuda interface. The Perl script saves 5 hours a week of data analysis and entry time. View the source code for the Barracuda Spam Processor Perl script.

 

In 2009, Mary created a transcripts database which consolidated legacy transcripts scanned in TIFF format with transcript data from the school's grading system. The transcript data is stored in PDF files with a user interface written in Microsoft Access. The goal of this project is to make one source for generating transcripts thus saving time for office staff.

 

"As a consultant, Mary Gammel’s programming work has saved St. Francis over 5 hours a week of tech time in managing the thousands of SPAM emails arriving every day. Using her web talents, Mary’s review of the St. Francis web site identified some technical issues which we have addressed. She also created a process to manage over 8,000 scanned transcripts for graduates, making it easy to find the right one without hunting though file cabinets for the paper version. Mary has worked hard to understand and improve Information Technology at St. Francis, and I highly recommend her to your business."

 

Paul Johnson - Assistant Director of Technology

St. Francis High School - College Preparatory

Wheaton Chamber of Commerce

In 2007 and 2008, Mary chaired the chamber's Web Site Task Force which was responsible for managing the redesign of the web site. The Task Force worked on multiple phases of the project, including requirements gathering, RFP creation, web site designer selection, project management, and testing. The chamber's new web site launched in July 2008. For her work on the Web Site Task Force, Mary won the chamber's Innovation Award in 2008.

 

In 2009, Mary served on the Membership Development and Community Relations committees. She developed the concept and performed the initial analysis for a Benefits at a Glance brochure. Mary also helps mentor new chamber members.

 

"Mary was the chairperson for our website task force. Her intricate knowledge of websites and how they worked was invaluable to our efforts in creating a professional presence on the web. Her attention to detail and extremely thorough review of the site as it was being created was instrumental in allowing us to have a seamless transition from one site to another. I found Mary a delight to work with; she was very patient as she walked us through each step of the process. I would recommend Mary to anyone looking to create a website or revamp an existing one!"

 

Lisa Bock - Executive Director

Wheaton Chamber of Commerce