Case Studies

Controlled Correspondence Tracking System for Congressional Budget Office Streamlines Process

Project At a Glance
RDA created an application for the Congressional Budget Office that allows a controlled correspondence to be stored and tracked in SharePoint. The new solution is easier for users to interact with than its predecessor and allowed CBO to standardize their technology on a single platform. It also reduced the support requirements of managing and maintaining a distributed Access application.

About Our Client

The Congressional Budget Office is the primary U.S. congressional agency charged with reviewing congressional budgets and other legislative initiatives with budgetary implications. Initially, RDA worked as a subcontractor to Nortec on this project, and subsequently worked directly with CBO.

 

Background

The Congressional Budget Office was looking to upgrade their existing controlled correspondence tracking system from an Access application to a custom solution utilizing Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007.  CBO receives several hundred correspondences a year that need to be monitored to ensure that the deliverables are returned on time and to the correct individuals.  The current system was difficult to use and maintain, creating additional work for those involved in this process. 

 

Solution Detail

RDA created an application that allows a controlled correspondence to be stored and tracked in SharePoint.  Requests could either be entered directly into SharePoint or could be processed though an application that scans the request and automatically uploads it into SharePoint.   The solution tracks the following actions and details:

• Identifies requesting Congress. 
• Assigns a Control Number.
• Captures the following dates: requested date, received, responses requested, response due, reply sent.
• Captures subject, notes, status, initial disposition, and category.
• Captures requestor (committee and/or member)
• Assigns who is responsible
• Assigns who needs to be notified
• Allows for an attachment – may be a scanned document  for subsequent retrieval by assignees.

Once the request has been created, it is routed through a workflow that tracks acknowledgement of the receipt of the request within 48 hours, and tracks the delivery of the final product by the due date as defined in the request item.  The workflow allows the tasks to be reassigned in case the original assignment was incorrect.

In addition to creating and tracking new requests, these requests are searchable through two avenues.  The first is through the standard SharePoint search capability.  The second method allows for filtering and sorting of the list of requests to help find specific requests.

 

Benefits

The re-design and deployment of the Controlled Correspondence system allowed CBO to standardize their technology on a single platform (SharePoint).  It also reduced the support requirements of managing and maintaining a distributed Access application.  Additionally, the new solution provides an application that is easier for users to interact with.

 

Technically Speaking

Architecture Overview
The main page of the Correspondence Tracking System consists of two components.  The first component defines several filter criteria to allow the user to search for one or more correspondences.  The second component displays the results based on the filter criteria defined in the first component.  Each component is implemented with an ASP.NET technology called “webpart”.  The webpart that implements the filter criteria is called the FilterCriteriaWebPart.

The webpart that displays the results is called the FilterWebPart.

The user can go to the detailed view of a specific correspondence in the FilterWebPart.  On the last column, there is a hyperlink named as “View”. 

If the user clicks that hyperlink, he/she will be brought to a detailed view of that correspondence.

As shown in the diagram above, if the correspondence contains a requester letter that is in PDF format, it will be displayed on the right side of the page as well.