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Recent Projects 

Project Summary: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights

Background

The Office for Civil Rights investigates and assists all civil rights issues that are reported to the Department of Education. For this project, SDI’s Wally McClure worked directly with Department of Education employees to set and implement requirements for the new application, while working within the structure of the Department’s pre-existing system (a custom developed Foxpro application). Because this application was installed in each office individually, data was stored accordingly. There was no centralized approach to storing the data, and there was no way for the Department headquarters to know what was going on with cases and requests for assistance without the aid of a time-consuming search process.

Problems with the pre-existing system included:

  • No centralized data.
  • No indexing; no foreign key relationships.
  • No centralized reporting.
  • No centralized data backup plan.
  • No ability to determine the status of cases and requests for assistance.

What did we do?

We worked directly with Department employees to determine the requirements of features for the new application. We also worked to create a priority list for correcting bugs. We created a formal reporting system that has the ability to perform queries; the pre-existing system lacked this capability. For example, it was previously impossible for the system to return a listing of all cases involving a particular school. Overall, the process of completing this project involved: resolving bugs, creating additional features, and creating and implementing a reporting system.

About the Application

Web-based, the CMS application provides a secure interface to manage cases and requests for technical assistance. The front-end of the application runs on Internet Explorer V6 and uses Java VM. The middle tier was written in VBScript for ASP, and Visual Basic 6 for COM+ components. The backend database is Microsoft Sql Server 2000.

The CMS application is better because:

  • The data is now stored in a central location.
  • Reporting is much easier.
  • The application is much more stable.
  • More features are available in the system.
  • Reports by management done immediately.