Say Hello to "Agency View-Point" (AVP) and goodbye to CERTSS.

Since WIA has changed to WIOA we see the perfect opportunity to move forward.


CERTSS was developed to manage the WIA-167 grant in 2004.  There have been separate modules created for;

  • NFJP
  • Health Services
  • TANF-TRAINING
  • CSBG
  • HEP

but each of these required a copy of CERTSS and modifications specific to the rules of the funding source.

Over the years and working with all of you, I have slowly developed an Enterprise architecture that will allow the new system to manage as many grants as an agency has and allow each user to see it from their point of view;


  • Field staff want a system that allows them to quickly and efficiently perform task such as intake, services, vouchers and follow ups.
  • MIS needs to be able to see real time numbers against the grants goals to modify policy and help the agency meet their goals.
  • MIS needs the ability to quickly diagnose issues that field staff are having.
  • Management needs features and reports to manage their Programs and see how their Programs are performing.
  • Program Directors need the ability to open a smartphone app and answer the CEO's question of "where do our numbers sit now?"


Agency View-Point will be known as AVP and it is here.  It may look the same in the beginning, but we have been changing the underlying framework to allow us to merge as many grants as your agency needs into the system.


AVP will be installed shortly to manage the transition to WIOA.  It will only be utilized VIA FosTech Cloud Services unless otherwise agreed upon by your agencies management staff. 


AVP is an N-Tier System and it will pull all of the Programs together into one plug and play framework that can be accessed by;

  • The Desktop version with Remote App technology
  • A Web Client for your browser is in development and will be available this year. 
  • Finally, FosTech has a team of developers we will be developing multiple smartphone apps to handle certain features in AVP. (If you have ideas of what features you would like to see in a smartphone app, then please let us know).


Since the design is for a N-Tier system, then we have much more flexibility.  The Middle.Intelligence Tier contains all of the business logic and intelligence. This tier will reside in the Azure Cloud as an Azure Cloud Services API that all 3 front ends will use to.  What 3 clients;  Yes.  There will be the current AVP Desktop via RemoteAPP client, the AVP Web Client via your browser, and smartphone/android apps for handling day to day tasks as well as pulling management reports on the fly.

The main issue on hand is moving from WIA and the SPR data format to WIOA and PIRL data format.  Rest Assured!  FosTech is on top of this and together we will make this a smooth transition.  I am creating another forum topic under feature requests. I will invite everyone to please be involved so that collaboratively we can already have this understood by the time Andrew explains things at the September AFOP 2016 conference.


I have attached 3 sets of files to this topic for your review.

The first set is the FosTech Cloud Services cloud bunker data centers.  Most cloud redundancy is performed by using VMWare which works below the operating system and copies images of the servers drives at certain intervals to a replicated site.  This works fine for most setups, but with SQL Server it means that any data entered since the last interval is lost if the data center has a critical failure.  To overcome this issue, we have instituted transactional SQL Server Replication.  Data is saved in SQL Server using transactions via a transaction log.  SQL Transactional Replication takes the transaction log once a transaction is complete and then applies that transaction to the fail-over SQL database in the fail-over cloud bunker.  This means that every transaction that runs on the production SQL Server, is then run against the fail-over SQL database as well.  In the event that the primary cloud bunker has a critical failure and the dns routes your connections to the fail-over bunker, that all of your data will be there.  Not just the data from the last interval.  We are excited to be able to provide such a robust cloud service for our clients.


The second file Participants.png is a screenshot with demo data of the CERTSS that everyone knows.


The third set of files are screenshots of what AVP will look like after phase 1.  These files are;

MainFormParticipantsTabl.png

MainFormParticipantTabOlive.png (demonstrates that we are implementing theme support in AVP)

ItemsNeededForEmployment-AddButtonClicked.png

IEPTrainingGoalsLocking.png (another image to show the new look and feel of AVP)

PartnerNameButton.png (another image to show the new look and feel of AVP)

View.png.  (Another...)



The best part of this move to FosTech Cloud Services is that once we have everything centralized, then we can quickly perform updates.  Currently, with 11 installations throughout the country it takes us 1 to 2 weeks to roll out an update, if not longer.  Once the system is centralized, we can quickly roll out an update every weekend.  Much of the work will occur under the hood, so you may not see it.  We will be sectioning the system so that we can easily plug in new parts for other grants/programs, new views for Program Directors, MIS and the Program Coodinator.  Look to see the feature set in AVP expand rapidly over the next 12 months.


With all of this going on, we are still moving forward with the N-Tier system, the web client and eventually the smart phone apps.  It is going to be an exciting year as we produce tools to make your jobs easier and easier.



Best Regards and we look forward to the future with each and everyone of our clients.  We thank you all for the opportunity you have given us to help you help others.

Kyle Foster
CEO/President
FosTech Solutions Inc.
(918) 470-8414

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 Our first move has been to get the FosTech Cloud Services Platform ready by installing everyone's CERTSS 2010 installation.  These installations are ready to roll out and we will start doing so tomorrow;

1.  First we install the RemoteApp link on all of an agencies CERTSS users devices and make sure they have access.

2.  Then we set a morning to start.  The night before FosTech will copy the latest data into our SQL servers.

3. The next morning the agencies users use the RemoteApp instead of the current CERTSS installation.


We will be rolling these out for the next couple of weeks.

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