Building around unknowns of client/server; Tucson school district exploits and stretches packages - the Tucson, AZ, Unified School District - Client/Server Computing - Cover Story

Software Magazine, March, 1992 by John Desmond

A small team of IS professionals at the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) in Arizona retired its DECsytem 10 mainframe from Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, Mass., two summers ago, but kept the cabinet for its air conditioning vents to the data center's raised floor. Today, Systempro servers from Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, and associated storage devices sit inside.

"It keeps them nice and cool," said Jesse Rodriquez, TUSD's director of information technologies, of the recyled cabinets. It also symbolizes TUSD's downsizing, which has accelerated to the point where the IBM System/38's days are numbered as well.

TUSD plans to move to a distributed system of PC local-aea networks (LANs) running NetWare from Novell, Inc., Provo, Utah, on the servers, and Windows 3.0 from Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., on the desktop, mixed in with Macintoshes from Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, Calif., used for instruction. This movement of computing power toward the desktop will help the district stay current with trends in education.

"In a district that is moving towards site-based management, which means empowering each school site to get the job done, the ability of the sites to access data really helps," said Roger Pfeuffer, assistant superintendent, business and operations services. "The demands of federal and state governments require us to have an increasingly sophisticated database and ways to massage the data."

Not all the software to make TUSD's client/server system work flawlessly is available today, but that is not stopping them from pushing ahead. They had software problems in the old days, too.

"The whole issue of moving from a central to a distributed system had to do with the problems we were having with the central system and the software associated with it," Pfeuffer said.

The required software falls into four categories: a student attendance and accounting system, which has critical ties to the district's annual funding from the state of over $200 million; the workstation environment consisting of a suite of Microsoft packages including Windows, Excel, Word and Project; DaVince e-Mail from Da Vince Systems Corp., Raleigh, N.C., which is used as wide-area E-mail utilizing message handling system (MHS) protocols; and instructional software for each of the district's 107 schools.

Clipper from Nantucket Software, Los Angeles, is used for application development; dBase III from Borland Intrnational, Inc., Scotts Valley, Calif., is used for report generation; Codebase from Sequiter, Edmonton, Alberta, accesses existing database files; and Windows Software Developers' Kit and Visual Basic from Microsoft are used to write Windows applications.

When the DECsystem 10 was retired in July 1990, it was said to be one of only three active in the country. The district's Cobol programmers had written all the key application code themselves, and they were finding it nearly impossible to maintain. "It got to the point where we were afraid to make changes to the code because we did not know the impact on other modules," Rodriguez said.

The application backlog was growing as well. Some 175 application requests were in the queue in 1984, each taking an average of 18 months to fulfill. The System/38 started running the district's financial and human resource applications in 1985. Today, TUSD is maintaining the 38 applications, but not writing new ones.

Rodriguez and his team saw the following advantages to a client/server, distributed architecture: better hardware price performance, a more attractive user interface, faster development and the ability to build the system incrementally. "We're looking at growing on top of a foundation as the software technology matures," said lee Zeltzer, senior consultant for TUSD. The district pieces together so many srhink-wrapped software components, that the commitment to any one of them is limited. Although, "We have made a bet on Microsoft," said programmer/analyst Brett Holtz.

The software challenges of moving to this downsized, distributed environment became immediately apparent. To bridge from the older student attendance system to a new one TUSD intends to develop on their own, the district bought the Osiris student record management package from CTB McGraw Hill, Denver, Colo. The package is not built to work in wide-area networks (WANs), however, which leads to problems, for instance, when trying to register one student in two schools. "That is a big problem from our standpoint," said John Merritt, programming manager.

To get around the limitations of Osiris, Merritt and programmer Brett Holtz wrote the Student Record Management System using Clipper. Each school maintains a complete database of its students, while TUSD headquarters maintains a mirror copy of each database. Headquarter also maintains up to 21 years of data on its students, which is required by law in Arizona. Keeping these databases synchronized is a challenge. An integrity-checking feature is in a pilot stage, scheduled to be implemented in September.