Background
NASA’s mission requires the design, construction and repair of space exploration vehicles such as the space shuttle. Part of the logistics involved in this effort is the procurement of engineering parts, an activity handled by NASA’s Electronic Parts and Packaging Program (NEPP).
The Challenge
NASA Goddard had no central place where engineers and scientists could order needed parts. This impeded NEPP’s ability to quickly service its customers. NEPP managers realized the program needed a central web portal which major NASA contractors could use to evaluate and select parts.
The Solution
As with any web portal, this one had to meet the needs of its users – in this case scientists and engineers needing to evaluate and order parts for use with important NASA projects.
Webworld worked with NASA personnel to identify the end-user and technical requirements for the site. This involved the identification of the type of content, its categorization, the overall information design of the site, end-user expectations and various technical factors.
After the requirements were gathered, Webworld produced a non-functioning prototype to demonstrate the screens and the general workflow involved. This was presented to NASA staff for approval.
Following NASA approval of the prototype, Webworld developers coded the site using the Webworld Content Manager (WCM), which was purchased by NASA. This involved not only the usual level of complexity for web content management sites, but also required the coding of custom functions to identify and maintain relationships between data specific to NASA.
Webworld maintained a development environment for this project, and also worked with the networking staff to help debug networking and email server issues. After the initial coding was completed, the site was put through a thorough series of tests, and any bugs detected were corrected. Finally, some new and additional features were added at NASA’s request.
The Results
The NEPP portal enables NASA personnel and contractors to evaluate and select parts for use in NASA engineering, maintenance and repair projects. The NASA organizations that use the portal include Space Science Enterprise (SSE), Earth Science Enterprise (ESE), Aerospace Technology Enterprise (ASTE) and Human Exploration and Development of Space Enterprise (HEDS). (See project details below.)
Upon completion of the project, NASA's Darryl Lakins, the NASA manager then in charge of the project, noted:
"It's been a pleasure working with Webworld. We have cleared a major hurdle for NASA when we were able to deliver the portal this past year. To date, we have up to almost .5 million hits a month. Last month, we had over 5000 unique visitors. Those visitors stayed on the site for an average time of 20 minutes. Since October, there has been over 50,000 downloads of documents.
"All of NASA's major contractors are the top organizations that use our site. Again, thank you for a nice job."
Project URL: http://nepp.nasa.gov/ | 
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