Enterprise migration & legacy app revamp

Montana State University needed to transition their AiM environment to Assetworks' SaaS platform to ensure continuity of operations and reduce dependency on on-premises infrastructure.

MSU faced the challenge of migrating their existing system while preserving custom developments built over years to streamline their operations. The migration needed to minimize disruption to their business processes.

As a consultant, I advised MSU on strategies to integrate their custom developments into the new SaaS environment. I provided detailed recommendations on combining these solutions with Assetworks' hosted platform, ensuring compatibility and efficiency, and managed parts of the migration process — coordinating with stakeholders to facilitate a smooth transition.

Before the contract ended, I also revamped the Mail Services department's internal Billing Application, which was struggling under outdated PHP running on an upgraded web server. Rather than patching the legacy code, I rearchitected the application to eliminate most of the PHP entirely — reducing it to a single processor file that handles Ajax requests from the front end. That move dramatically future-proofed the app against further server upgrades and made the codebase far easier to maintain. From there, I streamlined what remained, removed modules that were no longer in use, and simplified the billing workflow into a more elegant process. I built a new general ledger to track postage-due transactions, tightened data validation throughout, hardened the application's cybersecurity posture, and brought the entire app into compliance with MSU's online accessibility policies. The legacy PHP/HTML reporting tables were replaced with DataTables for sortable, searchable, far more usable reports. I left the team with a detailed technical document covering everything that had been done, plus a full implementation plan for the work still ahead.

The migration enabled MSU to leverage Assetworks' hosted environment with minimal interruption, and custom solutions were successfully integrated — saving time, reducing costs, and eliminating potential bottlenecks. The Mail Services Billing Application revamp resolved the PHP compatibility issues that had been causing problems on the upgraded server, gave staff a faster and cleaner billing workflow with proper postage-due ledger tracking, and brought the application up to modern standards for security, data integrity, and accessibility. The accompanying technical documentation and implementation plan ensured the team could carry the work forward after my contract ended.

Assetworks AiM · MySQL Server · Java · Python · PHP · Ajax · DataTables · WCAG accessibility · Application security · Technical documentation