Many coastal environmental monitoring systems exist around the United States. With the advent of the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) initiatives it is important that these systems find ways to maintain the data locally while providing a distributive approach to disseminating and visualizing the data. Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Dauphin Island Sea Lab, two Gulf coast marine labs, were establishing coastal environmental monitoring systems. In 2000, the data managers from the two labs came together and decided to create two systems mirrored after each other, so that the data would be stored locally at each lab and could be readily accessed at the other. Microsoft SQL Server, active server pages, and the web served as the backbone for this project. The two labs implemented ChartDirector for visualization. This backbone allows users on the web to visualize the data from the two labs side by side on the web. The system is also designed in such a way to facilitate the implementation of open source tools for participation in IOOS.