The Challenge

The Office of the General Assembly, which hums along nicely on an IBM iSeries, already had a green-screen legacy application that had been carefully constructed to take in all of the necessary information. It was sophisticated and complex in design. Their registration method required attendees to fill out and return a 4 page registration form, and then PCUSA employees entered the information from 3,000+ registration forms into the database via this legacy application.

Edwin Beck, Manager of Information Technology, explains the complexity, "We try to gather information as to how long they are staying at the conference, whether or not they have a roommate, their transportation to and from the conference, where they are staying, and then calculate for them how much their portion of the hotel bill will be for the days they are staying if they have a roommate, or if not. We also record where Commissioners are sitting at the conference, committees they may be participating in, whether they are using a laptop, an e-book, or paper documentation."

"It is quite intricate, and to have to completely rebuild it for the Web world would have been a real challenge. It basically tracks the attendees from the time they leave home to the time they leave the conference," explained Beck.

Because they didn't want to touch the existing application, and because it seemed at first to be the fastest and easiest way to get their existing application to the Internet, they decided initially to go with a "screen-scraper" solution. "Screen-scrapers" are software products that allows PCs to intercept character-based data from a midrange server and present it in a graphical user interface. In basic terms, it automatically turns what looks like green text on a black screen into what looks similar to a Web page. It sounded ideal.

The Solution

The Value

This new registration system was met with positive user feedback. "This year with the mrc application, we had twice as many users register online as before, which made up almost half of our registrants. It was a great improvement," said Beck. "We also had a major cost savings related to time. We no longer have to rely on printing out reports, and with the entire process automated, all of the time spent processing credit cards, and entering data is no longer necessary. We are now able to concentrate on more important items on our agenda."

Since finishing their Web registration application, PCUSA has begun to convert all the applications that had previously been written in the screen-scraper software into mrc-Productivity Series applications. Two such applications are:

• A minister inquiry system so that members can learn about their ministers, their minister's backgrounds, their educations, city of origin, mission work, etc.
• A church inquiry system that allows Presbyterians nation-wide to find churches near them and learn about the parish, the minister, address, year established, etc.

A third application that was never converted to a screen scraper app, but one they are currently bringing to the Web with mrc, is an application that will allow churches and presbyteries to report their data online, number of church members, contact information, etc, to keep statistics up to date with the national headquarters.

"We're very pleased with the application. It's been great. It does what we wanted it to do, and we've had a lot of positive feedback which was a really nice change from all the negative feedback we got using the old system. I should also add that our users with disabilities were very happy with the accessibility of it all," said Beck.

He considers, "The World Wide Web has so much to offer everyone, and it's important to be part of the ongoing movement to standardize applications and take another step closer to making the Web accessible to everyone."