Systems Engineering Seminar

Next Generation of Collaboration and Sharing capabilities for GSFC

Presented by:
Johnny Medina/585 and Chris Holtery/CSE

December 4, 2007, 1:00 p.m.
Building 3 Auditorium

Abstract:
Next Generation of Collaboration and Sharing capabilities for GSFC

At the turn of the decade, GSFC was just beginning to understand the market of Collaborative Engineering and Collaborative Technologies. The use of web-enabled technologies was a relatively new concept that was introducing many new ideas and products to the Center. At the time, Portal Systems were significant investments in large commercial systems with licensing in the several hundred thousand to millions of dollars.

At GSFC we focused on the need to help our projects and specifically Systems Engineers from early in the proposal stage of a mission through the engineering development and deployment. Our primary limitation at that time was cost. The systems acquisition as well as implementation and development costs were required to be delivered at the least expense possible. Delivering a commercial system was not possible, we decided to do our own development and leverage whatever additional resources we could along the way. The result of those efforts is the Virtual Systems Design Environment with the first production environment being launched in November of 2000.

Now, ten years later, the landscape has changed; IT capabilities have grown substantially along Web technologies and workgroup capabilities. The industry has several stable environments on the market: SharePoint, Oracle, and PTC Windchill, to name a few. NASA has expanded their horizons in as many directions as there are tools, across all Centers, with varied degrees of success.

At GSFC we are still living with the need for low cost, flexible solutions. The last several years have grown the competence and trust in web-enabled tools by our engineers and managers. This has in turn developed a thirst for more: better integration, more capabilities, and better support for Systems Engineering and Program Management.

Since 2000, VSDE has evolved. Along the way we have been capturing the ideas, questions and suggestions from the community. For about the past year, our group has been looking for more, the next step. We have been researching and experimenting with solutions that answer many of the questions and requests from the VSDE user community. On December 4th, we will open up our work to you and show GSFC what is coming over the coming months.

Biographies:

Mr. Johnny Medina is a Computer Engineer, Manager of Collaborative Technologies in Code 585. Mr. Medina has been at GSFC for over 16 years working on several Agency Initiatives over the last 6-7 years focused on improving the Agencies Engineering Infrastructure and Collaborative Engineering. Most recently Mr. Medina was the Requirements Lead for the CxP Computing Systems & Interoperability (CSI) Level II Systems Engineering & Integration (SE&I) team and is now supporting the Integrated Design Capability (IDC) and leading a DHS Science & Technology Collaborative Partnership Program. Mr. Medina was the original force behind the Virtual System Design Environment (VSDE), which started as a product of some of the Agency Initiatives and continues to this day as the Product Owner.

Mr. Christopher Holtery of Constellation Software Engineering, http://www.cse-corp.com is a consultant in research, development and implementation of Enterprise IT capabilities. Supporting the Goddard Space Flight Center since 2002, he is the Lead for the Virtual Systems Design Environment operations, development and future evolution.