UNSW Room Booking system migrated to the web

Problem
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Facilities Department maintains an aging 'Room Allocation, Planning, Information & Booking System (RAPIBS)' which is accessible only by a limited number of operators. This makes planning and allocation extremely difficult for the Centrally Allocated Teaching Space (CATS) staff, so the university sought a technological solution to the problem.

Solution
Australian Online Solutions (having been referred by the UNSW Chancellery) rapidly developed a web based solution which allowed all users (both on and off campus) to access real-time information about room availability via a simple-to-use read-only interface. This allowed them to conduct planning without consulting the database operators, who were then only required to execute the booking itself.

Specifications
The existing database was DataFlex hosted on a Novell NetWare server and accessible only via a proprietary command line interface. The new system was developed using Active Server Pages (ASP) with a DataFlex ODBC driver and hosted on Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) on Windows NT 4 using commodity PC hardware. It was simple to use, performant and reliable.