- Casewelder
Organizations that provide public services such as counseling, workforce training, and education are increasingly being faced with the challenge of meeting stringent program guidelines and reporting schedules. Increasingly, funders and grant-making organizations, are requiring greater accountability from the programs they fund. The complexity of the reporting process and project guidelines are compounded sometimes by aggressive deadlines.
Casewelder offers a powerful solution to meet these challenges based on Frameweld's approach of Rapid Application Development and Modular Architecture. The system was developed in a modular way in order to efficiently accommodate modifications. Form fields and their attributes and the rules governing the display of form fields and their dependencies are defined and stored in XML. The XML can be rapidly modified to add and remove form fields, change workflow and accommodate new user profiles.
User Profiles: The system provides for various user types, such as super-administrator, administrator, case manager, financial manager, and project director. Each user has access to a subset of functionality provided by the system.
Administrative Tools: The entire application can be managed via the web through the administrative interface. Super-administrators and administrators have a number of tools available for setting up affiliates and users, making alterations to data, generating reports and much more. A ticketing system allows staff at either NUL or its affiliates to address a question or issue by opening a ticket and allowing back and forth communication until the matter is resolved.
Participant-centric Focus: The system focuses on information at the participant level in order to track their status, profile, contact information, activities, and outcomes. Although complex from a development standpoint this is the ideal way of organizing an application of this nature. It is intuitive for end users (case managers and others) since they are dealing with participants and can update their records on an ongoing basis. This approach enables powerful reporting capabilities and also simplifies oversight. Frameweld can extend the reporting functionality of the system by creating new custom reports that can work with any data in the system.
Intelligent Forms: Intelligent forms for tracking user activities and outcomes are created by the system depending on the profile, status and current outcomes for each participant. In other words, forms contain no superfluous fields - each form presents only the relevant fields that must be completed for a particular participant based on their profile and other information. This increases the user-friendliness of the system, reduces training time for end users, eliminates the possibility of conflicting data and reduces the probability of data entry errors.
Open Standards: All the pages generated by the system use XHTML 1.0 and cascading style sheets (CSS). As a web-based application that adheres to open standards, the system can be used across multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) and browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Safari and many others).
Section 508 Compliant: The system is fully accessible to people with disabilities and is compliant with federal Section 508 regulations.
Open Source Technology: The system is based on open source technology, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 as the operating system, a modified version of Apache as the web server, PostgreSQL as the database, and PHP as the scripting language. There are multiple benefits in using open source technology, the zero-dollar cost, being one compelling benefit. More important is that established open source tools like these are usually the most widely deployed, most secure and best supported tools available with the largest developer communities maintaining and supporting them.
