IST on Microsoft
IST has been fully developed on Microsoft development tools, on the .net
" We are proud of the fact that
IST runs on Microsoft software
also made in Serbia. IST was
completely designed and
developed at the SORS, and
the MS SQL server, in which
lies the heart of our system, is
being developed in Belgrade,
at the Microsoft Development
Center Serbia. “
technology and the IST metadata is on the MS SQL server. Other databases in
the SORS are on the MS SQL Server, although the IST does not require that.
Why Microsoft
We opted for the MS SQL Server because of its robustness. Many functions
that others have to develop themselves, we simply leave to the MS SQL
Server. Thus, the authentication and authorization are absolutely in the
jurisdiction of Microsoft tools. The IST.net program uses Windows
authentication. That is how it accesses the databases on the SQL server.
It is not necessary to introduce rules for accessing some applications. The
application set in the IST respects all roles, user accounts and their accesses to
the tables of the appropriate database of the SQL server. Also, the whole
reporting system is based on Microsoft tools.
The simplest way to do reporting and BI
The IST forwards the txt file with an SQL query or procedure (the path is
located in the IST metadata) to the appropriate server, i.e. the database
located on it. The SQL server operates as requested from the forwarded txt
file, and if it is also requested, returns some of the data to the IST program,
which pairs it up with the appropriate header in Excel or XML format (the
path to the header is also located in the IST metadata), and forms a report in
Excel for the end user. In the SORS, Excel set itself apart as a format suited for
work reports, because of its ease of use and flexibility. The IST program
enables other output formats as well, one of which is XML.
Necessary foreknowledge for work
What is expected of the employees in the IT sector, that post applications on
the IST system ("program" in the IST), is that they are completely data-
oriented. The quality of the IST application used in the processing of statistical
survey depends on how well the database, in the background of statistic
survey, is designed and how well the queries and sql procedures are written.
What is expected of the employees in the statistic departments when it comes
to informatics is the basic knowledge of Windows operating system. The
IST.net program was written so that it is very user oriented and very intuitive.