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The electronic enigma

E-gov case file: HUD

WHO: Housing and Urban Development Department

What: The Real Estate Management System, which tracks and provides information on HUD’s insured and assisted properties.

Description: HUD hired American Technology Systems Inc. of Minneapolis to build REMS, a Web system serving more than 1,400 HUD employees.

The system, implemented in 1998 after six months of development, stores data on a property’s location, size, ownership and financing, and assistance contracts. Users can specify up to 50 criteria when requesting information to generate reports on demand.

In 1999, HUD added Actuate eReporting Server from Actuate Corp. of San Francisco as a reporting tool. The user interface, written with Cold Fusion from Allaire Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., runs under Netscape Server on a Sun Microsystems Corp. server, said project manager Jeff Carnicom. The Cold Fusion app interfaces via C++ tags and Actuate API to eReporting Server, which runs on a Sun Enterprise 3000 server. Actuate then communicates with the reporting database server, running on a separate Sun server.

Upshot: REMS provides HUD and end users with a single source of property information, resulting in consistent data, Carnicom said.