Mervyn Colton la open source forum 2003

Case Studies of 2 grant making organisations

Background.◦ Quest Computing◦ Total AIMS

Dublin City Council – Housing Adaption Grants System.

FNR – Research Grant system Common issues for Total Aims clients

Irish Software Company Started 1989 Originally Oracle and Progress Bespoke

Software development Became product focused late 90’s Used Unix since 1990. Used open source since 2000

Schemes

Central Contacts Database

Smart Forms

Letters, e-mail & Publications

Monitoring

Flexbase

APIs(Oracle, JDE, Sun)

FundingProcessing Module

CASE Handling Module

Reports

Inbox

Meetings

Budgets

Payments

Security

Searching

Translation Mgr.

AIMS

Housing Adaptation Grants System National scheme, implemented by each

council Means tested Options for external reports – Occupational

Therapist’s Assessments Different rules depending on the age of the

house.

System facilities required:◦ Workflow, to process the grant through a number

of departments / sections / people within DCC.◦ Document management◦ CRM facilities◦ Electronic application forms◦ Automated letter production

Technical facilities required:◦ Ability to send payment details through to the

Oracle Financials◦ Ability to extend the system, to allow custom

business rules and grant calculation algorithm to be executed

◦ COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) product preferred approach.

◦ Data Migration, to allow historic data to be loaded.

Established in 1999 The National Research Fund (FNR) has

developed various thematic and structural funding instruments that helped to construct Luxembourg’s reputation as a research site.

They run 13 schemes, in 3 different areas. PhD, Postdoc, Project Grants, Mobility

grants etc.

Required a system to: Allow online applications to be processed. Allow online external reviewers to review

specific applications. Interface directly with Luxemburg’s banking

system to process payments. Build a history of all applications each

researcher has been involved in. Allow FNR to modify and change the

standard forms and template letters used by the system.

Technical Requirements: Operate on windows servers.

SLA – Service Level Agreements. Releases and Upgrades. Understanding what is open source, and

what is Quest’s.

Clients want regular SLA’s. A real person in a real company that they

can contract with. One single SLA for the complete application.

Example: RedHat sla on Linux.

Clients want product releases, with all open source elements included and tested together.

Clients would like one release note, listing the changes and issues on each part of the system regardless of where it came from.

Clients can maintain some elements, such as style sheets themselves.

Quest uses a number of open source tools, utilities, products, widgets including:◦ Xihna HTML editor, for use by end users as a

wysiwg letter editor.◦ Open Office, for use by our pdf generator to read

our RTF output format and convert it to PDF◦ Graphviz, used to generate diagrams to visually

document the workflows used in Total Aims.◦ iText. Tool for PDF manipulation, specifically for

creating one PDF by combining a number of other documents.

Quest have written the Grant Management Specific items including:◦ Budget Management◦ Decisions and commitments◦ Meetings and Decisions◦ Payments◦ Financial API

Quest views these are proprietary software, Whereby we do not open the sources or the IP to 3rd parties.

How does Quest interact with parties that provide open source elements in AIMS:◦ SLA’s with some suppliers◦ Fix issues and bugs in open source code, and

return to the open source “pool”◦ Pay 3rd parties to enhance the open source tools

that we use◦ Co-operation with some suppliers to jointly

improve some features of open source code.

Sample of AIMS clientsSample of AIMS clients