Laminar Consulting Services was engaged to provide a senior SharePoint Architect and Developer to assist in their Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 implementation.  The goal was to provide a senior resource to help mentor their internal staff on the best practices for enhancing and deploying MOSS throughout their enterprise. Laminar was also asked to provide development services from time to time for those requirements that were beyond the skill of the internal Information Technology staff.

Over the course of a year and a half we provided services on a part time basis which worked out to be roughly 20 hours a week.  This allowed Roland to make enhancements to their SharePoint site without dedicating an entire team to any given project.  Roland DGA later decided to make part of their SharePoint site and external facing portal for their dealers to track orders and create service orders.  In addition the application needed to be extended by building an External Security Provider since their dealers weren’t part of their Active Directory Structure.  We were also responsible for creating the Service Order Entry portion of the application that is integrated with some of their back end systems such as Great Plains and Microsoft CRM 3.0.

At the time Eastern Municipal Water District was finding itself with an expanding market, increased product demand and a highly mobile work force that readily needed easy access to Training information.

In an effort to safely provide high quality services, the Eastern Municipal Water District has a responsibility to provide safety information and training to its both permanent and temporary employees. The ongoing training effort was not only a matter of employee development, but also in many cases a matter of regulatory compliance.  EMWD was utilizing a number of manual and semi-automated tools to manage and coordinate employee training activities.

As a result, Laminar Consulting Services was engaged to provide Eastern Municipal Water District with recommendations, scope and approach of the development of the next generation Training Depot System.

The Training Depot project was designed to meet the existing Training Information Management challenge by leveraging existing training information management tools and technologies and joining them with advanced tools and technologies.

The Training Depot was developed as the next evolution of an integrated Training Information Management System and provides self management capabilities and reporting services that supports the growing safety, compliance and efficiency goals of the Eastern Municipal Water District.

Laminar’s team ’s technical approach was to design the proposed solution using .Net technologies into a multi-tiered architecture effectively encapsulating functionality and separating presentation, business and data layers and to simplify and consolidate the data access interface to effectively represent the true data structure. These efforts allowed for easier extensibility, maintainability and deployment of the application, make it easier to deal with usability and consistency issues and allow for refinements in the business logic without affecting other parts of the application.

The Training Depot was developed in a phased approach following structured development methodologies. The solutions Presentation Services was comprised of a combination of thin (Web/Intranet Based) clients and mobile Windows Forms for improved attendance collection activities. The Presentation Services of the application was used to access information via Data Services hosted on central application servers. The Data Services provide robust information integration capabilities to support increased information transfer requirements. These points of integration provide access to existing systems which will maximize the existing IT infrastructure investments.  The Service Oriented multi-tiered approach provided maximum flexibility to meet both the current and future needs of EMWD.

The Training Depot is a browser-based application and is an integral part of a larger solution which includes integration with the existing Cyborg system.