What We Did for Gordon Return   About Gordon Gordon is C. E. O. of a not for profit corporation that supplies a basket of social services to his area. One of the services supplied is the Ontario Early Years Program. Gordon had his staff begin developing an application for administering and reporting on this program. His key staff defined the information they needed and had base tables developed. What they could not do was create the reporting required for complex government demands and refine the interface to the point where it was useable by a staff at several levels including volunteer help. What was done The reporting requirements were examined in depth. Entity/Attribute and Entity/Relationship studies were completed. Further join tables were created that would bring the elements of the various reports into single tables for reporting purposes. All of the reports required ordinal as well as summary elements and the necessary data post processing routines were put in place. The original feel and look of the interface was retained as this was the look and feel decided on by Gordon's staff. The interface elements were expanded and made clear for novice users and volunteer help. Permissions were set in place through out the program for developers, administrators, data entry personnel and view only personnel. The Result The users of the centres are now registered and attendance is taken using scanned membership cards. The centre lending library is fully administered and library items are now efficiently processed in and out using scanners. Events may be planned and data is kept on participants, facilitators, sponsoring organizations, speakers, volunteers and facilities. Volunteers are registered with the centres and their activities are kept on file so that they may be given credit for the good work that they do. The program is running three separate centres in three separate towns from one server over a wide area network. The program generates all of the government mandated reports required. Followup This program is now being used throughout Central Ontario. It is being used on Macintosh and Windows platforms. It has been deployed as single user solutions, over local area networks and over wide area networks. I am very pleased that we have been a substantial part of this development. I am especially proud in that our development began in February 2003 with initial deployment in April of 2003. Over the balance of the year improvements were made to the program as the staff used it more an more. The program was deployed to other jurisdictions as of spring of 2004. A major administration tool has been brought on line. I look forward to further improving this system as requirements change over time.   Return