\n\tThe College of Education has somewhere between nine and a dozen (depends how you count them) distinct information system applications.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tBuilding these applications separately had some advantages. It kept the domain logic specific, gave a clear context to design decisions, prevented cross system bugs, and let us keep iterating on and improving our framework. But it has gotten to the point where the technical debt of maintaining those multiple systems is impacting our ability to deliver new functionality.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tGoing forward our plan is to have a shared infrastructure that we implement new applications in and when the opportunity arises fold the existing applications into the shared framework. We are calling the new unified application infrastructure "Educ" since it will potentially house all College of Education information systems. The new Person and Budget databases are built in Educ and Appreview Plus project includes migrating SOARS to the shared framework.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWithin the Educ project we create "contexts" so the single application and database under the hood can still appear as distinct systems on the surface. Switching "contexts" between Person and Budget and Appreview gives you different titles, menus, and search scopes. It looks like you are switching applications, but you are navigating between sections.\n<\/p>\n