Case Studies

Infostrat - Case Studies
Infostrat - Microsoft Government Contracts Management System (CMS)
Infostrat - Electronic Permits Management (e-Permits)
Infostrat - Marine Corps Recruiting Information Support System
Infostrat - Marine Corps Recruiting Command Automated Enlistment Package
Infostrat - Graduate Management Admission Council
Infostrat - Defense Commissary Agency Enterprise Architecture
Infostrat - Institute of Museum and Library Services Grants Management System
Infostrat - Office of Personnel Management (OPM) EmployeeExpress.gov
Infostrat - Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Microsoft CRM 3.0 Deployment
Infostrat - CHS BizTalk Server 2006 Data Integration
Infostrat - Dangerous Goods Shipment

Office of Personnel Management  www.EmployeeExpress.gov

Infostrat assisted with the migration of the Office of Personnel Management human resources portal called Employee Express to the Microsoft .NET architecture.

BACKGROUND
The OPM TSC (OPM), located in Macon, Georgia, is an automation design, development, and operations center providing support for a variety of human resources management (HR) systems that serve customers in OPM, other Federal agencies, and State and local agencies and their constituents.

Among other systems, the OPM currently operates a Federal government benefits selection system called Employee Express (www.employeeexpress.gov). Employee Express is an automated system that puts Federal employees in control of their own discretionary personnel-payroll data without using paper forms.

Other major Employee Express components include a customer service helpdesk, reports and administrative function site, transcription services, and interface communications (data file transfer). Employee Express supports more than one million Federal employees.

PROBLEM DEFINITION
OPM’s Employee Express portal infrastructure had become brittle and overburdened. The original architecture was not designed to handle the high volume of federal employees the successful portal had attracted over several years. Updates and reports required manual attention, and unacceptably slowed the system. Employee Express required a complete rewrite of its core architecture in a modern, flexible and scaleable framework.

PROJECT DEFINITION
GTSI and Infostrat (the GTSI Team) won the opportunity to provide technical expertise and professional services involved in re-engineering the existing Employee Express portal, including database design, software migration, and system upgrades. The functionality of the system remained almost the same, while the architecture and technology were totally rebuilt from the ground up using the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET.

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Business Profile
United States Office of Personnel Management

Solution at a glance
Migrated portal to serve over 1 million users

Technologies involved
.NET Framework
ASP.NET
Visual Basic.NET
Visual Studio .NET
SQL Server 2000

PROJECT OBJECTIVES
The GTSI Team provided technical and engineering services to the customer to assist in re-engineering the current Employee Express to meet the following objectives:

  • Assist in architectural and design decisions
  • Validate site architecture
  • Transfer .NET knowledge to customer team members
  • Mentor customer software developers
  • Reduce time to deploy migrated site
  • Share best practices relating to .Net development

PROJECT OUTCOME
After project kickoff, the GTSI Team learned that the customer required a greater level of .NET learning than had been originally estimated. OPM had planned on immediately assuming much of the development work. An aggressive timeline conspired with a longer OPM .NET learning curve to seriously jeopardize the project.

The GTSI Team approached the customer early in the project with identified risks and options. We helped the customer make important decisions to keep the project on track, and stepped up to bear more of the project burden by developing the application’s framework and taking on several of the application modules.

GTSI Project Management, and close collaboration with its trusted sub-contractor InfoStrat helped make the project.  We successfully delivered a stable Employee Express portal, re-written in the .NET framework, meeting aggressive, fixed milestones set to accommodate a large addition of the Veterans Administration, and its 250,000 employees, to the Employee Express portal.

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These case studies are provided to illustrate the capabilities of Infostrat in delivering solutions on the Microsoft platform. They do not represent an endorsement of Infostrat, GTSI Corporation, or Microsoft Corporation by the customer.