Trials and tribulations of implementing intranet technology: the Cassini Information Access System

The Cassini Information Access System (IAS) was built to provide Cassini Integration and Test engineers with ready access to current technical and logistical project information. World Wide Web (www) technology was used to provide a consistent user interface to pre-existing interactive systems as well as new repositories and interactive services developed specifically for Cassini. A Web "gateway" was developed for each pre-existing data service. Each service had its unique requirements including read-only and read-and-write access to SQL databases. Other requirements called for the development of many background processes to handle the access of data produced by proprietary databases and non-database data repositories. Through the use of the www, anonymous ftp, Novell services, and unique data conversion programs, we were able to put the system into limited operation by August 1995 and full operation by March 1996.