By Greg Fabian, Associate Branch Chief, Infrastructure Branch

As you probably know, the focus of the SDWIS Prime project has shifted to developing the Compliance Monitoring Data Portal. You can see the schedule for CMDP on the latest metro map here in the SDWIS document library in SharePoint. On the referenced metro map, you’ll note that CMDP development occurs during Sprints 16-20. Sprint 15 was an “infrastructure sprint” used to setup the environment for CMDP development, so there wasn’t any state Subject Matter Expert (SME). You may hear someone mention “CMDP Sprint 3” which is Sprint 17 on the metro map.

In a way, the metro map is perpetuating the notion that CMDP is something separate from SDWIS Prime. But that’s not really the case. The same developers are using the same tools and the same development methodologies for CMDP as they used for SDWIS Prime. The big difference is that CMDP uses a separate user experience, or “front end”, for the laboratories and water systems accessing the CMDP “side” of SDWIS Prime. If you’re familiar with SDWIS State and Lab-to-State, then CMDP is like a more tightly integrated Lab-to-State on steroids.

While CMDP development goes on and our developers work on building out that part of SDWIS Prime, the project team continues to move on with other important project work. One aspect of this work is the “refactoring” of screens delivered in the preproduction version of SDWIS Prime. The project team is very interested in hearing your ideas for “tightening-up” the SDWIS Prime screens and workflows. Please feel free to send your ideas to SDWISPrime@epa.gov or post them in the SDWIS Prime Ideas forum on the SharePoint site.

Through the summer and into the fall, we really want to take a look at the compliance, monitoring, enforcement, and water system assistance (CMEWA) business areas. The team created and shared a number of screen mockups with the community last winter. We haven’t received a lot a feedback – and I know that looking at a bunch of static drawings can be daunting – but it would be great to hear your thoughts and ideas. Depending upon funding availability (which will affect the start date), we plan to do another “deep dive” into the CMEWA business area to make sure that we have it right. As soon as we know, we’ll let you know the status of this effort and the details.

We also plan on holding the monthly SDWIS update calls the second Thursday of every month from 1-2 PM eastern time (click here to add this event to your calendar – requires access to SharePoint). News on the SDWIS Prime front may be a bit “light” for the time being, but we’ll also cover CMDP, SDWIS State, and other related systems and issues. In the meantime, please take some time to experiment with the preproduction version of SDWIS Prime and let us know what you think.

SDWIS Email Communications

After several starts and fits (and probably a few more to come), the project team is now using the bulk email features of Microsoft Exchange to send out SDWIS-related emails. In order to effectively use this feature, we had to change our SDWISPrime@epa.gov email account. In the process, we lost connection to that account, but we’ve fixed the issue now and the account works. Some of the advantages of using the bulk email features include:

• Instead of getting a huge number of addresses in the “to” line in the message, the message is addressed only to you. This avoids an issue where some emails weren’t getting through some state’s email filters because of the number of recipients.
• Allows us to better manage our email list. Over the years, we’ve accumulated a lot of contacts. During that time, people have changed jobs or retired, but we continued to pester them with emails or sent emails out into the ether. We’re now curating our email list and removing bad email addresses, adding new people that have recently joined the program, and removing people who have told us that they have left the program or don’t want to be disturbed.

In addition, we’re changing the way that we send out meeting invitations. Instead of sending you a meeting invitation, we’ll send you a link to the meeting invitation. When you click on the link, your browser will connect to the SDWIS SharePoint site and ask if you want to open the meeting invitation. If you click yes, it will open in your default calendar application (such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc.). You can then save this invitation to your calendar. We prefer to use this method for meetings involving larger groups though you may still receive an email invitation for smaller meetings.