National Math & Science Initiative

AEM Corporation
San Antonio, TX USA

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.
	NMSI Users.
	Grantees.
	Schools beneath the grantees.

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 grantees' and schools' progress.

Announcement Management.

The NMSI application accomplishes the following major tasks:

	Tracks milestones set by NMSI that the schools and grantees must meet.
	Serves as an appointment manager.
	Provides forms that allow the grantees and schools to input the data required to evaluate their performance.

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 in which they maintain the data required track the grantees' and schools' progress.

Event Scheduler.

We customized areas to include:

	An event scheduler.
	A library where directories and documents can be added and moved using click and drag (based on permissions).
	A reporting section full of standard reports, charts, graphs, etc.

Application size and scope

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.

The project

The project took two people four months to develop. The Iron Speed Designer portion took two months, including the learning curve.

Code extensions and customizations

We wrote approximately 5,000 lines of code customizations to extend our 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.

Page layout customizations

We did not do any layout customizations; we used standard Iron Speed Designer themes.

Iron Speed Designer impact

I believe we saved more than 1,000 hours of development time and more than $40,000 in development costs by using Iron Speed Designer. Without Iron Speed Designer, the project would have taken approximately ten months. While we would still have developed the NMSI application without Iron Speed Designer, it would have cost us significantly more.

Next steps

We do have plans to extend our application in the future. We'll be adding more users and deploying to additional sites.

About the developer

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.