For many years, the systems used to centralize account reconciliation and administration, University affiliate authorization for account access, and billing of account usage have been a primarily VMS- and Fortran-based assemblage of programs. With UCS's decommissioning of VMS came the final push to reengineer the systems and port them to a UNIX environment and a more modern language set. We are using a commercial database product (currently INFORMIX) and are coding to ODBC specifications.
In the reengineered system, we are expanding current functionality to include a potentially very large (7-digit) user population, many of whom are very peripherally affiliated with the University (as in external users who need access to databases or web-based information but do not need networked account access). We are also addressing the long list of enhancements and fixes which have accumulated over the years relating to this increasingly out-of-date but surprisingly robust system and are designing in modern security paradigms.