Client Profile

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is responsible for policies and programs in support of Canada's economic, ecological and scientific interests in oceans and inland waters. The Pacific Age Lab is a high-calibre facility that processes over 200,000 biological specimens from around North America every year.

The Challenge

DFO needed to migrate their legacy Ingres/VAX application to newer technology, while preserving the productivity advantages of the old character-based application in a GUI environment. The variability of data across Species, Methods, and Clients Projects was a key requirement to enabling future extensibility.

Solution Highlights

In about 3 months and 75 person days we migrated the existing application to a GUI-based system, sharing the same data and application framework previously developed for the DFO NuSEDS project. The change of technology to data entry via a Web browser required a complete redesign of the processes for entering and managing data, as well as powerful productivity features to avoid increasing the time taken to process common and exceptional cases.

Technologies Used

Currently, the standalone applications have been deployed on Windows '95, '98, NT and XP, using Apache Tomcat.

Integrating all data and processes provides DFO with a significant cost saving and quality improvement.