Ingrid Jansen in Rome

Some of you might already have heard this, some of you don't know anything about it yet. I'm being sent to Rome from June 25th until July 28th! I'll be working at the United Nations World Food Programme - WFP for short - in Rome!

How did this come around?

The company TNT Express is doing a lot for the WFP. TNT Express is an important customer for Ordina. Now, they need someone with knowledge of Oracle Forms-applications. Since TNT Express couldn't provide for someone themselves, they asked whether Ordina could help them out. And since the company I work for, Vertis, is part of Ordina since January 1st this year, the question finally landed with us.
Our projectbureau then did some research as to who fits the requested profile and then my CV turned up.

What will I be doing in Rome?

WFP's task is to take care of food transport from where it is to where it is needed. For example, transporting european grain surplus to earthquakevictims. In order to keep track of what is where, and where it's going and when it will arrive there, they have an Oracle-Forms-application called COMPAS.
At the moment everybody has his own little oracle-database with his own COMPAS installation. Periodically all data is synchronized with Headquarters in Rome. This means it may take up to several weeks before all data arrives (if it arrives at all). And that means that you can be sure you never have all accurate and complete data in your system..
Now that is really becoming very irritating they came up with the idea of centralizing the whole system and offer COMPAS via Citrix as published application. Just like the ApplicationNet company does. Since internet connections in Africa aren't as good as they are here, this needs to be tested. Also some research needs to be done what changes COMPAS needs in order to accomodate this new architecture.

And in the weekends I'll be doing a lot of sightseeing! I never was in Rome before, so I'm planning to be touristing all of the time. I'll keep a weekly report on my website for all of you to keep you posted of everything going on down south.

Ciao,
Ingrid.