Closer To Home
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Kim Freeborn, Closer To Home
US Closer To Home has been using kbmMW™ for remote data entry and file services for about two and a half years.
CTH provides an array of services to children and families:
- Family support
- Group homes
- Community centres
- Shelters and foster care.
Thus the services are spread out and require the ability to remotely connect to administrative information services.
Administration runs off a Win2000 server with approximately 30 users. There are currently about 20 users who connect remotely to a Win2000 professional machine on the same network.
We are currently using the old 93.a version and haven't experienced any problems with this version. All clients are fat sending full queries to a backend paradox database using the BDE. Yes I know it's antiquated. It has remained this way because there are other modules that connect to the kbmMW™ services for data entry and reports.
The kbmMW™ clients are written in Delphi 6 and the other modules are still Delphi1 - God help us. The older modules collect service evaluation information, training information, and intake information. The kbmMW™ modules take care of daily reporting of activities and events, file sharing, testing results, documentation, reporting and scheduling activities with alarms.
On the kbmMW™ side there are four main clients.
A manager client that allows program managers and directors to view activities at each layer of the organization's hierarchy. Beyond this there are the direct care activities reported by group homes, family support workers and coordinators.
The framework for the clients is based on a notebook metaphor with forms subclassed inside of a page control. The notebook for each remote client inherits form a main notebook that provides dataentry services, export services to Excel and Word and CSV, spelling services, and filtering, searching, sorting services on the currently selected dataset or page.
There are also calendar and scheduling services and basic arithmatic services that can be used to total and average columns in a dataset. The clientquery has been modified to provide tablerights so activities on the tool bars can be updated systematically without need for further programming. These are connected through an actionlist with action components that talk to the datamodule by way of data events.
The actual loading of forms is managed by the individual client notebook and form changes are communicated to the datamodule and the respective data units which load and run the queries. Each client has a single application and an universal upgrade program to get updates from the server.
Client machines are typically win98 with 128mg of ram. The limitations of the machines has not been an impediment to the success of the program.
Adhoc querying is done locally on the network and remotely with an adaption of clientquery component that sends and runs QBE queries on the back end.
For the future CTH plans to include for intake services and evaluation and training services on kbmMW™ given the success of the program so far. This will reduce the reliance on administration staff and reduce the current paperflow between levels.
CTH also plans to incorporate more calendar sharing. The new publish subscribe layer that Kim has built should help with this as well as provide a "messenger" layer for internal ICS activity.
Closer To Home.
Kim Freeborn, Closer to home - US.