An engineering school is like a small town, with its residents, students, teachers, and all the infrastructure associated with it. Many applications are needed and made accessible on our Intranet. When the combination of Delphi and IntraWeb was evaluated, it was immediately obvious that the goal could be achieved.
Faculte Polytechnique de Mons
The Faculte Polytechnique de Mons (FPMs) is located in the heart of City of Mons in southern Belgium. The Faculte, founded as a mining school in 1836, was awarded university status in 1920. It was the first institute of technology created in Belgium and is the oldest university in Mons. The Faculte is a small institution consisting of approximately 1,000 students and 200 academics and research fellows, with a friendly atmosphere.
The Faculte provides higher education with a five-year degrees leading to Civil Engineer degrees. The Faculte awards engineering degrees in seven disciplines, including architecture, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science & management, mechanical engineering, science of material and mining. The Faculte also offers postgraduate (DEC2, DES) diplomas in various disciplines including nuclear engineering, applied geology, quality management, quality control, as well as DEA and doctorate degrees in applied sciences.
Close links with the professions and industrial world keep the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons courses synchronized with current business needs and also provide a broad range of internship opportunities for students.
The Faculte has built its reputation of excellence in professional education. Its graduates are versatile, multilingual, and well prepared to work on teams. Most courses are recognized by the relevant professional bodies and lead to successful employment prospects for graduates.
Last but not least the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons Department of Architecture has contributed to a large extent to the success of the urban renovation of the City of Mons. The City of Mons is an artistic center of incomparable charm, and a very pleasent place in which to study and live.
Situation
Projects in need of developement:
- Faculty and student access and management of lessons, teachers, students, administrative personel, and on-line registration.
- Real time management of the computer labs.
- Mail and news applications for our different portals.
- Multiple applications to manage the internal warehouses (IT stuff, Workshops, Restaurant, &)
- Telephone book.
- Gateway between human resources and accounting apps.
- Word to PDF translator.
- Exploitation of data from the main security access to the buildings and the time management of the employees
- Other management applications
Implementation
Some of the applications are in production and the remaining are under analysis or in development phase. A single login system has been created that is common to all applications. We were able to rapidly develop prototypes of new applications. In most cases the prototypes wer of such quality that they became the production versions.
IntraWeb has made us “victims” of the RAD aspect of Delphi + Intraweb, because increasingly more people are asking us to migrate their old applications to a new Web based version based on the results of earlier deployments.
The time to develop using IntraWeb has been very fast, but the list of the new applications to build seems to be infinite and growing.
Technology
Tools: Delphi, IntraWeb, TMS components.
Web server: Microsoft Internet Information Server
Database: Microsoft SQL Server.
Number of users: up to 1,000.
Number of developers : 2.
Some additional web services and COM components were written using Visual Studio.net and reused within the IntraWeb applications.