FIS user section

• Duration: approx. 2 hours
• Who is it for? All staff members who administer third-party funding requests for projects, and all project leaders and heads of organisational units who review and approve funding reports.
• What is it about? This training session introduces the new Research Information System (FIS) at TU Braunschweig. In the first phase of the system’s development, the focus is on presenting research projects carried out by researchers and project managers at TU Braunschweig. As part of this, the FIS will also be used in future to report external funding.
  •  Overview of the applications
  • Roles and permissions
  • Projects for recording research funding
  • Creating projects
  • Viewing project funding
  • Approval process
  • Modifying data

• Duration: approx. 1 hour
• Who is it for? Staff and researchers who have already worked with FIS. 
• What is it about? Advanced online training on FIS: in addition to general functions and useful information such as searching and role allocation, two practical examples of creating project change requests will be discussed. There will be an opportunity for an open discussion afterwards.
• How can you register? By emailing fis-support@tu-braunschweig.de

Researchers at TU Braunschweig have automatic access to FIS via the TU Connect login. Technical and administrative staff can request a FIS user role by sending an informal email to FIS Support. Please state in your email request the organisational unit for which the role is to be activated and please CC your supervisor. Once access has been set up, you will be notified by the FIS Support.

Once the draft for the project change request has been finalised, the request can be handed to the project leader via changing the processing status the ‘Workflow’ tab to "project leader". This setting causes the project change request to appear on the project leaders starting page in the ‘My Project Notices (Verify & forward)’ portlet. If the project leader still does not see the project change request on the starting page, this may be due to the following reasons: 

•  The project manager has selected a different role. For reviewing and posting project change requests, the role ‘Researcher’ should generally be selected. 
•  A new project leader has been entered in the project change request. The change of the project leader must be approved by the original project leader. This is why the project change request appears for the previous project leader and not in the portlet of the newly entered leader. If the previous project leader is no longer available to approve it, the project change request can be approved by the head of the organisational unit. To do this, the head of the unit must log in with the role "Leiter/in", search for the project change request using the internal order number (Key field) or another attribute, and then click on "Verify & forward". 

If none of the above cases apply, please contact FIS Support.

Once you have logged into TU Connect and selected your FIS role, several so-called portlets (pre-configured search queries) will be available on your home page. Using these portlets, you can see which project notifications are in draft status and which are in the approval process. If you click on a project notice in the approval process, you can see further approvals below to check whether review levels 1 and 2 (usually department and faculty management) have given their approval. The portlets differ in part depending on your role in the system. FIS administrators can also see whether project notices have already been forwarded to the project management or need to be processed further.

All finalised and approved DiFAs have been migrated to FIS and are available as a basis for any change requests that may be required. To access the data in FIS, it is best to use the "Search for projects" menu option, entering the internal order number in the "Key" field as the search criterion. Next, click on the pencil icon to navigate to the relevant project and select the "requests" tab. There you will find all submitted requests. Click on the magnifying glass to open the individual request and scroll down to the "Documents" section. The documents must be downloaded to view them. Please ignore the areas marked in yellow; when the DiFA data was merged into the FIS screen, some details could not be hidden. 

For your information, the first DiFA is stored in FIS with the application type “funding notification”. Further DiFAs for the same internal order (e.g. in the event of a change to the duration) are recorded as application type “Project change request”. All newly recorded applications in FIS are saved with the application type “Project change request”.

At present, the FIS only offers limited support for email notifications. Notifications regarding changes and assessment tasks are currently only visible after logging in and selecting the relevant role on the TU Connect homepage. As notifications are a fundamental requirement for FIS users, this was made clear to HIS eG right at the start of the implementation project. With the release of version 2025.06, HIS eG has responded to this need and introduced the functionality for subject-specific events. Following extensive testing, it has become apparent that the current development stage is not yet usable for TU Braunschweig, as it is not possible to differentiate notifications by organisational unit. The FIS Support Team is in close contact with HIS eG’s specialist consultants and is confident that the functionality can be implemented for TU Braunschweig by the middle of the year.

Updates on this matter will be communicated promptly via the email distribution list and the FIS Handbook under the ‘News’ section.

At present, FIS Support can only export data from a project in a limited capacity. Further technical options are currently being reviewed and will be implemented as soon as possible.