UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

• Healthcare
  • Mgmt. Summary
  • Technical Summary
• Emergency Services
  • Mgmt. Summary
  • Technical Summary
• Justice/Law Enforcement
  • Mgmt. Summary
  • Technical Summary
• Unemployment Benefits
  • Mgmt. Summary
  • Technical Summary
• Legacy Terminals
  • Mgmt. Summary
  • Technical Summary
• Public Safety
  • Mgmt. Summary
  • Technical Summary

By law, an out-of-work individual should only receive unemployment benefits from a single state.  The Unemployment Information Interstate Connection Network (UI-ICON) is a national organization that allows for this check.  The business requirement for this project was to provide a connection from a State’s legacy mainframe application to UI-ICON when the legacy mainframe did not support UI-ICON’s communication technology.

Backstory

• Unemployment benefits are provided by the State.
• It is illegal for an applicant to receive unemployment benefits from more than one state at the same time.
• The UI-ICON, located in Florida, serves as a message switch for information about unemployment benefits applicants and the state in which the applicant is enrolled.
• Many States, upon receiving an unemployment benefits application, send pertinent information to UI-ICON to verify with other States that the individual is not already receiving unemployment benefits assistance.
• The State’s front-end software that communicated with UI-ICON was out of compliance. It provided the above functionality but was running on unsupported software.
• The back-end software, running on a legacy mainframe, had no compliance issues.

Business Objective

• Ensure that unemployment benefits applicants are not already receiving unemployment benefits from other states

Functional Requirements

• Ensure that the front-end system that communicates with UI-ICON is in compliance with IT best practices
• Ensure that the new system provides better or the same response time as the existing system
• Ensure that the new system functions with the existing site’s UI-ICON testing tools

• Communicate with UI-ICON using UI-ICON-defined Web Services protocol
• Communicate with Unisys MCP Server using proprietary CCF-TCP protocol
• Require no changes to the back-end legacy mainframe application
• Replace the current out-of-compliance front-end environment with a system that utilizes
  • Windows Server® 2008 R2
  • Development via Visual Studio® 2010
  • Development language of C++
• Eliminate the dependency on the current SQL database in order to reduce complexity
• Support separate production and test virtual machine (VM) environments

Outcome

By the development of several Filters, the Plexus Message Broker was enhanced to replicate the communication with the back-end legacy mainframe such that no changes to the legacy mainframe applications were necessary.  Communication to UI-ICON over a proprietary protocol was also implemented.  The Plexus Broker was then configured to run both in the production and test environments.