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| Case Study: | Activities Tracking System (ATS) | ![[National Institute of Health Logo]](images/nihlogo.gif) |
| Client: | National Cancer Institute | |
| URL: | http://fangc.nci.nih.gov/cmatdb/ http://fangc.nci.nih.gov/cmatadmin/login.html |
The Challenge
The Office of Liaison Activities was looking for a company to take over the maintenance and design of what was originally called the Contact Management and Activity Tracking Database. The tracking system had been designed and implemented by another contractor but was not functioning to OLA's expectations. The system needed to have existing defects corrected as well as new enhancements incorporated.
System Description
The Activities Tracking System (ATS) allows the National Cancer Institute, a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, to make public its interactions with consumer advocates, scientific and professional organizations, and other federal agencies. This is important to NCI because it shows that the agency is responsive to its constituency. The ATS also helps NCI work more efficiently and reduces duplication of effort within the Institute.
The ATS has two separate interfaces, Public and Admin, to manage activities that are accessed by different types of users and provide different types of information. The Public interface can be accessed by any user in the NCI Intranet. It provides access to several canned reports regarding activities as well as a search engine with multiple types of searches to choose from. In addition, the user can choose to add an activity to the system or submit a revision to an existing activity. The Admin interface can only be accessed by OLA via username and password. It allows OLA administrators to add/edit/delete people, organizations, activities, and NCI offices. It also gives authorized OLA users the power to approve or reject new or revised activities entered by a user on the public side.
The TCG Solution
TCG was tasked with taking the system OLA already had and making it better. To accomplish this goal, a two-step approach was incorporated. First, the existing system was fully tested and a list of currently outstanding defects was made. We then worked to clean up all these problems before beginning to incorporate new changes. Once all the defects were corrected, we copied the new code out to production and OLA was able to start using a functioning system. Second, the new enhancements to the system were incorporated. By taking a two-step approach to system development, the users were able to use a functioning system while the enhancements were being implemented.
Some major things we added were: the add similar/save as new functionality (similar to the NCI Calendar); a new look for all the reports to give them a cleaner appearance as well as adding many new ones; the ability to delete things like people, organizations, offices, etc.; keyword search functionality indicators for required fields with corresponding JavaScript warnings; and more.
Technology Used
The Activities Tracking System (ATS) allows National Cancer Institute (NCI) users to retrieve information about activities, organizations, and contacts using a web browser and the NCI Intranet. The data is stored in tables of an Oracle database while programs that handle the user interface and database retrieval functions are written using server-side JavaScript and run on a Netscape server.
- The database server is Oracle 8
- Netscape Web server
- Both the Web server and the database are running SunOS 5.5.1
- The scripts are written in an Server-Side Javascript
