EDUCATION

Case 1 - One of the Largest Universities in the US

Case 2 - Curriculam Qualification Authority

Case 3 - State Agency for Public School Employees Retirement Fund

Case 1:

Customer: One of the largest universities in the US
Technology: JSP, MF COBOL, Windows NT, Oracle

The Customer

The university is an old reputed public institution with ten sister universities located in the US. Kiplinger and the US News and World Report had rated it one of the best universities.

The Challenge

The university had mission critical applications running on Unisys mainframe. With the Unisys hardware support terminating in mid 2003, the university had to migrate their solution to a newer technology. About 92 online Programs, 695 batch programs, 410 screens and 637 batch scripts were to be migrated. There were a total of over 650,000 lines of code.

The Solution

Tata Infotech recommended a cost-effective and a quicker solution to the University whereby it migrated the mainframe systems as well as web-enabled them at one go meeting key business requirements.
Tata Infotech reengineered the university's mainframe-based core business applications to a modern, open and web-enabled system. The new system is deployed on a J2EE environment, a Windows 2000 platform, and has an Oracle 9i database. The project used object wrapper technology from Microfocus. Currently more than 600 users use the legacy system for student information, accounting and budgeting, records & registration, admissions, financial aid and human resource purposes. The revamped system is also integrated with other internal applications of the University.
The project was executed out of Tata Infotech's sprawling software development center at Mumbai, India and at the university's location.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Services said, "Since 1985 the University has been developing its administrative computing systems. The administrate staff, faculty and students have been quite pleased with the functionality of our highly integrated systems although the underlying architecture was reaching the end of its lifecycle and limiting further cost effective development necessary to meet the current and future computing and communication needs of the university community. The migration to the modern architecture being completed with the help of Tata Infotech will position the university so that the best parts of the current systems can be preserved and moved forward, while a cost effective environment for the development of needed new applications for the future is being put in place. This project is crucial for the future success of the university. We reviewed a significant cross section of potential partners for this project and it was clear to me and my staff that Tata Infotech was the company that has the technical knowledge and skills coupled with a well developed model for effective project management necessary for a successful completion of this project. To this date the project is on schedule and I am very confident it will remain on schedule with a high quality completed product."

Customer Benefits

With the new system on board the university can re-engineer its business processes progressively through a prioritization of business requirements rather than vendor support requirements. Overall application management costs have reduced, as platform costs have reduced and operational efficiency is increased.

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Case 2:

Customer: Curriculum Qualification Authority
Technology: Microsoft ASP.NET, ASP.NET Web forms, XML/XSLT, XML Web services, Microsoft COM+ developed using VB, Microsoft ADO.NET, SQL server 2000.


The Customer

The authority is a guardian of standards in education and training in the country. It works to maintain and develop the school curriculum and associated assessments, and to accredit and monitor qualifications in schools and colleges.
The authority helps the department responsible for -education and skills to achieve its aims by guarding standards in education and training. It provides advice to the Secretary of State about the school curriculum, about ways pupils and students are assessed and about qualifications in both general education and training. It also:

The Challenge

The authority embarked upon a very ambitious program of translating the Government's desire to conduct online examination for assessing pupil's performance against the national curriculum level description for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in schools all over the country.
The authority intends to develop online tests and supporting familiarization and practice materials for the tests, in a phased manner. The pilot project is aimed to assess pupil performance at the end of the national level for 11 to 14 year old students. The limited pilot in 2004 will cover 2% of the schools in the country. The program will then be progressively extended to cover other schools, levels and subjects.

The solution

Tata Infotech has endeavored to provide a cost effective, leading edge technology based software solution that fits the requirements of the authority. Tata Infotech will design the CBA system as per the authority’s needs and in conjunction with its staff and with the partner's assistance. As a major systems integrator and software services organization, Tata Infotech offered a unique perspective to this engagement. The scope of work by Tata Infotech in the project includes:

Central Management Shell

The Central Management Shell, which resides on the Central Point System (CPS), will be developed using the Microsoft .NET framework to deliver a robust, scaleable and extensible solution. It will be hosted and administered by the partner. Interaction between the school sites and the CPS system, mainly relating to delivery of test packages to schools and return of results and audit data from schools, will be through secure web pages and web services using HTTPS over the Internet. Technology used will be Microsoft ASP.NET and ASP.NET web forms and XML/XSLT for presentation layer and Microsoft ADO.NET for data access. Backend database is Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

Administration Shell

The Administration Shell resides on the Admin Point System (APS) at the school catering to the school specific requirements relating to test set up, supervision and return of results to the CPS. Technology used for the Administration Shell will be JSP, Java Servlets for presentation layer and JAVA, XML web service for business logic. Data access will be through JDBC with PostgreSQL as the backend database.

Security will be an important aspect of the entire project. PKI based security will be used when transferring data files between systems. Tata Infotech's Fortiora™ CSAR™ Certificate Server product shall be used for generation; storage and distribution of Digital Certificates based on managed security policies. The digital certificates can then be used to cater to the requirements of the system for secure transfer of test data between different subsystems, ensuring confidentiality of the test data, authentication of the testing authorities themselves and preventing tampering or leaking of test papers and test results.

The solution also has to plan for future integration with a national database.

Customer Benefits

The solution enables the customer to administer online tests and support familiarization and practice material used to assess pupils’ performance against the national curriculum for information and communication technologies (ICT).

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Case 3:

Customer: State Agency for Public School Employees' Retirement Fund
Technology: A-Series, LINC 16.2, COBOL 74, DMS II, and TCL

The Customer

The agency is responsible for the retirement monetary well being of the public school employees in the state.

The Challenge

The Year 2000 renovation project for the agency was to address the Year 2000 problem using field expansion strategy. The agency had 18 COBOL applications in all, of which 11 applications were under the scope of Tata Infotech, (whereas the remaining 7 were under the scope of the agency) and 3 LINC applications, which were all under the scope of Tata Infotech. Of the 11 COBOL and 3 LINC applications, the agency had identified 5 COBOL applications and 1 LINC application as mission critical and the rest as non-mission critical applications.

The Solution

The project included the following phases:

Renovation planning, pilot and acceptance were carried out on site, whereas the actual renovation was done at the SEEPZ development center of Tata Infotech in Mumbai.

The mission critical REFUND system identified by the agency was renovated during the pilot.

The renovation phase was divided into two Customer Input Packages (CIPs). Each contained a substantial number of COBOL as well as LINC objects. A total 168 COBOL programs and 460 LINC objects were analyzed, renovated, reviewed and fractionally tested during the project. The fractional testing for COBOL code was done using the FACTT tool and LINC objects were tested using LINCLITE.

The project was carried out over a period of 7 months with 14 consultants. The offshore renovation was completed one month before the estimated completion date.

The acceptance phases for both the COP1 and COP2 were carried out onsite at the customer’s facility. The acceptance of COP2 had to be carried out as per the earlier estimated schedule, since it was not possible for the agency to advance it.

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