A room with a viewer
A Viewer to a Kill
This is where we were. Here, we had a fantastic system for drafting work prints, for updating and
maintaining our records system. Surely the distribution of this information would be equally as
sophisticated. After all, the records distribution in our company is liken to a company in and of
itself. We have a product for which there is a demand from our customers, the outside plant field
technician. We have our data in digital format, how can we best provide this service to our
customer?
Well, unfortunately our records 'company' was more like a monopoly. Sure we had a product,
and indeed there was a demand for this product. But instead of giving our customers what they
wanted (and in many cases, needed), we chose to give them what we could with the least amount
of effort... .Paper and aperture cards.
Now wait a minute, you say. Isn't that the same output format that you used in a manual
environment? Exactly. We took great pains to develop the best AM/FM system we could, and
succeeded. And we wound up with a fine system that was easily used, just so long as you had
access to our system. And this access must be in the form of a UNIX workstation hooked up to
our wide area network. This proved a bit difficult for our customers who were in the field
running trouble.
We began looking at several alternatives. We first established that paper and aperture cards had
to go away. They are expensive to produce as well as maintain. That given, all solutions pointed
to the need for computers in the hands of our users. Since many of our techs are in a somewhat
hostile environment, this PC needed to be able to withstand the rigors of the outside world. And
it would be beneficial to be able to carry this PC inside a building or manhole and not be tethered
to a motor vehicle. Thus our solution was looking at a ruggedized laptop PC.
Now that we had the PC, how best to get the data from the wide area network to the wide-open
spaces. Since we are talking about several gigabits of data we looked at two possibilities, intranet
and CD. Let's explore these two options.
First, the intranet. Using an intranet to the widespread dissemination of information is definitely
in vogue these days in our company. Policies, practices, bulletins, all sorts of information are
available, used and encouraged. Could we allow access to this records system via and intranet
connection? The answer here is yes, and in fact we are doing that to some extent today. The
problem, we found, was not access to the records database but rather access to the wide area
network. Many of our locations are not currently connected to the WAN via LAN, and therefore
must dial in through a secure Remote Access Server. Sitting at a desk top PC with a 33.6 modem
provides access, but when you talk passing graphic images across this modem line, the speed is
quite slow. Our field technicians are a different story. In our market area, access to digital
cellular technology is not as far reaching as we would like. Therefore, we would be forced to
access the RAS via cellular modems. Lets talk about slow. As an experiment, I traveled to the
field with my Motorola cellular phone, my laptop, and a modem. After three attempts, I was able
to log into the RAS, at a connect rate of 1400. Just to make sure we understand each other, I did
not drop a digit in the preparation of this report. That was a connect rate of 1400, not 14,400.
After being dropped several times, I was finally able to establish a good connection, access my
database, and waited 22 minutes for my first record to appear on the screen. Given today's
technology, we could not see the intranet as a viable solution for the outside plant tech.
That took us to CD'S. What we wished to do here was create a CD with some number of records
on it. We are still talking about several gig worth of data, and did not wish to carry dozens of
CD's around, so we needed the data compressed to be able to fit as many wire centers as possible
on a single CD. It needed to be searchable, user friendly, and we needed the ability to red line
these drawings without affecting the data. And it had to be able to deal with several different
drawing formats, from scanned raster to pure vector to hybrid raster/vector drawings. Most
viewing packages allow one format or the other, but not both. Thus we went in search of the
ultimate viewing software. This started to remind us of a Don Quitiox quest, until we came
across NMT corporation with their FAAR program, which gave us all of the abilities we sought
and then some. We could search, tile drawings, print, markup, and distribute to our field forces in
a timely and efficient manner.
