| National Math & Science Initiative (NMSI) |
| National Math & Science Initiativ |
"I believe we saved more than 1,000 hours of development time and
more than $40,000 in development cost by using Iron Speed Designer." - Charles Criswell of AEM Corporation
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National Math & Science Initiative |
AEM Corporation
San Antonio, TX USA
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The National Math & Science Initiative (NMSI) provides grants to schools and other
institutions for the advancement of math and science. AEM Corporation developed the
new NMSI application to help NMSI achieve its goal of advancing math and science in
the U.S.
Grantee's main dashboard
The application is used by four groups:
 | Application Administrators
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| NMSI Users
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| Grantees
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| Schools beneath the grantees
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These grantees and schools must meet certain standards to receive their grant money.
We provide NMSI with this tool to gather and report on the grantee’s and school’s
progress.
Announcement Management
The NMSI application accomplishes the following major tasks:
| Tracks milestones set by NMSI that the schools and grantees must meet
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| Serves as an appointment manager
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| Provides forms that allow the grantees and schools to input the data required to
evaluate their performance
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Permission to access the NMSI application is based on sign-in. The Initial page is a
portal to the main menu. From the main menu, clients get snapshots of milestones,
announcements, and calendar events. The menu items take the users to various forms
they maintain the data required track the grantees’ and schools’ progress.
Event Scheduler
We customized areas to include:
| An event scheduler
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| A library where directories and documents can be added and moved using click and
drag (based on permissions).
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| A reporting section full of standard reports, charts, graphs, etc.
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Application Size and Scope |
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The application utilizes one Microsoft SQL Server database. The database is comprised
of 85 tables, with 36 views. There are more than 150 Web pages in the application. The
database table with the largest number of records is the Revenue table.
We estimate that the NMSI application has approximately 160 users per month, with more
than 30,000 transactions.
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The Project |
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The project took two people four months to develop. The Iron Speed Designer portion
took two months, including the learning curve.
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Code Extensions and Customizations |
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We wrote approximately 5,000 lines of code customizations to extend our generated application.
They included the Event Calendar, Master Library, and portals. We also added a third-party
component, using ComponentOne. The code customizations took about two months to write.
Master Library
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Page Layout Customizations |
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We did not do any layout customizations; we used standard Iron Speed Designer themes.
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Iron Speed Designer Impact |
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I believe we saved more than 1,000 hours of development time and more than $40,000 in
development cost by using Iron Speed Designer. Without Iron Speed Designer, the project
would have taken approximately 10 months. While we would still have developed the NMSI
application without Iron Speed Designer, it would have cost us significantly more.
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Next Steps |
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We do have plans to extend our application in the future. We’ll be adding more users and
deploying to additional sites.
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About the Developer |
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Charles C. Criswell is the Senior Developer at AEM Corporation. He has an MCSD in
Computer Science. His development background is primarily in Microsoft ASP.NET and
Microsoft SQL Server.
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