Due to public expectations to derive the absolute maximum from tax dollars for highway projects and maintenance, CDOT had not invested heavily in its own facilities and recently reached a crossroads. Many of its more than 800 facilities needed repairs as budget dollars went to construction and maintenance of roads and bridges, and to programs to enhance driver safety.

The first major need was getting a comprehensive picture of CDOT facilities. Sandy Gallagher, CDOT headquarters facilities manager, and Mike Anders, statewide property management program manager, headed up this significant challenge.

"We had no aggregate information on the condition of our facilities," said Gallagher. "We own OR operate everything from office space to maintenance sheds to housing. The contents of these facilities range from employee offices to highway anti-icers and fuel. We didn't have specifics on the ages of the buildings, their square-footage, OR things like the condition of the roof and supporting electrical OR plumbing infrastructure. Collectively, our facilities, vehicles, and supplies are worth several hundred million dollars. We needed extensive information—and an ability to analyze and track that data—to justify the capital improvements that they required."

CDOT worked with a consulting firm to gather data at every facility and entered that data into one large database of useful information.

Aspenroot's team of Adam Rowe, project manager, and Lori Gottschalk, lead developer, immediately recommended a solution based on Macromedia ColdFusion. However, at the time, ColdFusion was not a recognized standard within the CDOT IT department, which had committed to pure Java as its platform for new solutions. As external consultants, Rowe and Gottschalk decided to prototype in ColdFusion and port that application over to Java OR another enterprise package before handing off the final system to CDOT.

"We are committed to ColdFusion as a development solution," said Rowe. "It's very affordable and we can create enterprise applications quickly. The fact that we were able to prototype a solution for CDOT in six weeks was key to winning their support and strengthening our relationship."

In six months, a team of three developers and a project leader created the entire "Real Estate Management System (REMS)"—a zero-footprint distributed application hosted on the CDOT intranet that enables management and staff to view, analyze and update detailed information on all of CDOT's facilities.

Users can select individual buildings and view complete details from multiple perspectives, including AutoCAD plots, photographs, mechanical and electrical systems, foundation, walls/doors, windows, roofs, and ADA compliance. Collectively, these metrics are calculated by REMS to create an overall "grade" for each facility.

"We now have a distributed application that allows changes to be made on location, as opposed to a slow paper trail," Anders said. "The data we now have access to through ColdFusion drives both the budget and the decision process for every type of property CDOT owns."

"It's entirely menu-driven, so it's easy for every staff member to use," said Gallagher. "That usability has helped make this ColdFusion application strategically important to us in gaining the attention at the highest levels of CDOT to justify our capital-expenditure requests. We needed to bring our own facilities back up to a condition that is appropriate for their function—and that implies significant amounts of money. With REMS, we've been able to justify that funding and get the attention this issue deserves."

That kind of application success doesn't stay unnoticed for long. Soon, CDOT's Information Systems Center Management Team formally accepted ColdFusion as the official developer web tool. "Once they saw how easy it was to develop, and how stable the resulting application was, they saw the value pretty quickly," Rowe said.

"With ColdFusion, we achieved what every consulting firm aims for: we created a custom application that met the needs of both groups. The IT department appreciated the low cost, ease-of-use, and supportability of ColdFusion and the Facilities group was very happy with the functionality of the application—the cost of which was well below their expectations and prior solutions."

Macromedia products:
Macromedia ColdFusion Studio; Macromedia ColdFusion Server, Enterprise Edition; Macromedia Dreamweaver

Hardware:
Server: Compaq ProliantDL3000, two Pentium III processors, 600 MHz
Web Server: 2 Compaq ProLiant's DL 360s, one Pentium III processor at 1.0 GHz each

Operating system:
Microsoft Windows 2000

Database:
Microsoft SQL Server

Size of DB:
1 Gig

Development Team:
2 full-time developers, 1 subcontractor and one project leader

Application Traffic:
25 users with update privileges, 3,000 with read privileges

Benefits of Macromedia:
· Rapid Development: Prototype quickly and still create a very stable, durable application.
· Affordability: Cost-effective solution compared to other commercial software.
· Stability: From prototype to finished application, ColdFusion enables developers to provide highly stable solutions.