My site

Goto Page 2 Page 3 Home

2004 DIGITAL 21 STRATEGY

To sustain the momentum created in the last five years the HKSAR Government has conducted a review of the 2001 Digital 21 Strategy and intends to issue an updated Strategy in early 2004. Public comments on the draft 2004 Digital 21 Strategy are invited. I have been in Engineering since 1981 and have personally experienced PC evolution from the Apple II. Below I want to share with readers my personal experience in an attempt to paperless office using low cost IT technology and know-how.PaperLess Office, A Practical Need

The idea of paperless office, an idealistic dream invented by a technology marketer, is hardly new. It is a matter of degree and how practical, more importantly cost effective, one can implement such an idea into the working environment for better work collaboration, information sharing and use less paper.

During the course of a contract in recent years we received 1,250 hardcopy drawings from the Engineer, produced 7,800 ACAD drawings ourselves, received 3,950 ACAD drawings from vendors, and handled 120,000 incoming and outgoing mails. On top of these we have 30Mb of databases tracking drawing/document submissions and mail register (in Excel and Access files) to satisfy ISO requirements. The infrastructure is there, i.e. a computer network connecting 65 members of the project team. The question is how to implement a system, at reasonable costs, which would enable access to information stored in network servers and share scanned documentation by all members of the team?
What Products Are Available?

My client has experience with Enterprise level content management solution such that those from Documentum. Of course they have done even more paper-centric engineering project such as nuclear power station (PS: 2005 comment, my client said this job that we did together generated more paper than a nuclear power job). I had looked at a small scale demonstration of a similar document retrieval system but when I was told about cost of it in HK$ of 7 digits I said "No Thank You!". Other document management systems I have looked at include LaserFiche and those available from NETsolutions Asia back in 1998. In the end, my client, my client's client, and our company failed to agree on a common platform.

There were few low cost approaches possible.

• Desktop application, even if this could do it, I'll have to distribute upgrades and patches from time to time to 60+ members of my team which could be a tedious job. Although the same OS (Operating System) is used, i.e. Microsoft Windows, throughout in the team but I will have to design something that will suit multiple versions of OS due to natural phasing out of old PC's. Note that I'm not programmer by profession.
• Plain HTML webpage, this is not helping at all as users can't query databases/spreadsheets.
• Server-side application, such as ASP, PHP, CGI etc.

The answer lies with server-side application using Internet Explorer as client. This costs nothing additional as the browser comes with the OS and everyone is on Windows. For dynamic HTML webpage running server application there are few choices but obviously a Microsoft product would be best, and it's free. Active Server Page 3.0 was chosen and it comes free with Windows 98 Second Edition via Personal Web Server (PWS).

A brief shopping list to build the Intranet is as follows.

1. Web server Any PC running on Windows 98SE
2. Client Internet Explorer, comes free with the OS
3. Network server NT4.0 existing
4. Scanner HP - $4,388 (year 1999 price)
5. Programming tool Code-Genie, shareware or Notepad that comes free with the OS
6. Databases Excel, Access, existing

Goto Page 2 Page 3 Home