Press Releases
Hyperwave Unlocks Vaults of Information For Environmental Systems
Design
Innovative server and enterprise portal enable easy knowledge
sharing
November 13, 2000
Hyperwave Information Management, a leading provider of Knowledge
Management solutions and Enterprise Information Portals today officially
introduced the newest member of its user family: Environmental Systems
Design, Inc., the largest mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire
protection and communication technology engineering consulting firm
in the Midwest. ESD, like other knowledge-intensive organizations,
had an intranet filled with difficult-to-accesss yet vital information,
and is now using Hyperwave technology to make its stored knowledge
easier for employees to find and utilize.
"Hyperwave's powerful search capabilities make it an outstanding
choice for organizing and managing 33 years' worth of knowledge,"
says Mark Andersen, vice president of ESD and head of IT for the
company. ESD's 300 employees will use the Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal and the underlying Hyperwave Information Server to store
and retrieve information ranging from building codes and engineering
specifications to the company's human resources policies.
ESD was especially impressed with Hyperwave's ability to make
the company's Exchange documents part of its searchable repository.
"Whenever someone sends around an e-mail with news, we can
just drop it into the public folder so in the future we can find
it," said Andersen. In the past, such information might not
have been captured in ESD's intranet and, even if it were, it might
not have been findable because of the intranet's lack of a search
capability. Now, ESD will easily be able to make its documents,
including PDF files, fully searchable through Hyperwave. As Andersen
notes, Hyperwave's search capability not only finds relevant documents,
but can utilize authoring information to identify the company's
experts on any given topic - a handy tool when an engineer needs
a two-way discussion with an authority, not just a handful of reference
documents.
In just a short period of use, Andersen also has discovered the
value of Hyperwave's unique link management technology, the key
to making the Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal easy to set up and maintain.
With Hyperwave, every hyperlink associated with a document is dynamically
managed apart from the document itself. Thus, if documents are moved,
the links are updated so that hyperlink navigation is not upset.
Andersen, who reconfigured some of the portal's pages, said the
built-in link management is definitely a time saver. "Being
able to move stuff around and have the links still there and still
accurate without having to re-link everything, that's unbelievable,"
he said. "It's almost like magic."
Link management also delivers a new level of security to the ESD
intranet. Andersen says that the company's old intranet used NT
security to keep users from entering areas they weren't authorized
to see - clicking on a link to restricted information would return
an error message. But Hyperwave takes security a step further, evaluating
access rights before displaying hyperlinks, so that a user sees
hyperlinks only to documents he or she is authorized to access.
"I really like that if you're not privileged to go there, you
don't even see the link," said Andersen. "It should or
will reduce the temptation to hack."
"ESD, like many of our customers, has discovered the Hyperwave
difference," said Tim Kounadis, vice president of North America
Marketing. "They realize that simple aggregation and categorization
of information in a portal is simply not enough. For a portal to
be truly effective and live up to the challenging of being a key
tool in a knowledge management toolkit, you need the contributive,
collaborative and profiling features that we provide. The unique
link management feature assures a reliable solution that heightens
user satisfaction by not subjecting them to the inconvenience of
broken links, and does so without requiring any incremental IT resources.
About Environmental Systems Design, Inc.
Environmental Systems Design, Inc., founded in 1967, has grown
to become one of the largest Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing and
Fire Protection consulting engineering firms. In addition to the
MEP disciplines, ESD has various specialty groups, making us unique
in the industry. These include Life Safety, Central Plant Design,
e-Technology, Building Automation and Utility and Energy Efficiency
services, thus providing our clients with a full service consulting
engineering services.
For more information, please visit: http://www.esdesign.com
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