June 2003.
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The Norwegian Building Center's mission is to spread knowledge and professional information to consumers and professionals within the building & construction industry in Norway. With the new Microsoft Office System/Hyper.Net based solution, the Building Centre has optimized the entire process of collecting, creating and distributing valuable information to more than 3.500 businesses in the right media and format.
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"The new forward-facing Web Portal and the underlying document management and publishing technology enables us to effectively collect, maintain and distribute large amounts of information to our customers," says Halvard Gavelstad, Managing Director of The Norwegian Building Centre. "Previously this process has been very labour intensive and costly to distribute via CD-Rom. With the new automated solution we can react fast to changing market needs, and immediately provide up-to-date information to all our customers. Our core process has been optimized and we are able to provide new and improved customer services. In addition we expect the increased productivity of our information workers will provide a rapid ROI."
Standard Technologies vs. Custom Development
Before making the final decision to deploy a solution based on standard technologies, the Building Centre researched the cost of a custom-developed application. "The amount of information and the complexity in our requirements made this unfeasible. The cost of development and maintenance was far to high, and we needed to reduce the risk and the time required to implement a custom solution," explains IT manager Hans Hope.
"We contacted Microsoft to identify whether it would be reasonable to implement our content-intensive processes on the standard Microsoft platform. Based on the requirements, Microsoft Consulting Services recommended a solution based on the Microsoft Office System, including SharePoint Portal Server and Hyper.Net. This has proven to be the right choice, and Microsoft Partner Osiris Data - a Coextant Business Partner - has delivered a flexible solution that meets our requirements - on time and within the budget."
Forward-Facing Web Portal
The Building Centre has implemented a set of subscription-based publications which are easily reached on the new Internet Web Portal. Current publications available include:
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Norwegian Building Directory; building product information, divided according to European standard product groups. The products are fully described with color illustrations and photographs.
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Building Regulations series; professionals can easily keep up-to-date on essential Norwegian building legislation and relevant technical regulations.
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Planning series; a basic reference manual for area planning, focusing on relevant laws, regulations and governmental guidelines, all commented and explained.
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The planning and building law for professionals; the single most important Norwegian law concerning planning and building in Norway, commented and explained.
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All publications are available in multiple formats, including XML/HTML for on-line viewing and navigation, and PDF for downloading and printing.
Back-End Document Authoring, Management and Publishing
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All documents are authored in the Microsoft Office System with a set of web-optimized authoring templates. The Document Library of SharePoint Portal Server is leveraged for document storage, profiling, check in/out, versioning and approval, thus providing the information workers with a central, flexible, maintainable and auditable repository.
Hyper.Net leverages SharePoint Portal Server and monitors document add, delete, and modify events as they occur, passing the appropriate information to the Hyper.Net Content Automation Server for transformation. Hyper.Net then takes the documents, breaks them down into XML-based relational data, creating hypertext topics, tables of contents, hyperlinks, and metadata mappings, and generates multiple wed-ready deployment formats such as HTML, XML and PDF.
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"As a knowledge-intensive organization, we wanted to streamline and simplify the authoring and distribution processes. In addition we wanted to leverage the investment in our existing platform and minimize the required training in new tools and interfaces. Today anybody in the organization is able to provide content for our web sites directly from Office, with very limited training requirements. In addition we are able to maintain and extend the solution without investing in new IT skills," states Hans Hope.
A Partner Success for Coextant
"We are energized about the project at The Norwegian Building Centre for several reasons. First of all our partner has implemented a solution according to the specified requirements. Secondly, the project shows how Hyper.Net extends the power of the Microsoft Office System and SharePoint Products and Tchnologies to complex business applications and forward-facing Web Sites," states Robert Nederby, Managing Director of Coextant Systems Denmark. "Thirdly, the solution was implemented by a new partner, and thus supports our strategy for building up and expanding our partner network in the Microsoft community."
"During our first Hyper.Net project we have gained the necessary know-how to implement Hyper.Net solutions for new and existing customers. Hyper.Net provides a competitive advantage, reduces time and risks in custom development projects, and allows us to design and implement exciting business-oriented solutions on the Microsoft platform," concludes Pål K. Børseth-Hansen, Managing Partner at Osiris Data in Norway.
About The Norwegian Building Centre
The Norwegian Building Centre was founded in 1956, with the aim of providing important information for professionals within the building industry. It is committed to spreading knowledge and professional information to consumers and professionals within the building & construction industry in the right media and format according to the market at all times.
The Norwegian Building Centre is a member of UICB; Union Internationale des Centres du Bâtiment (International Union of Building Centers) - a world wide organization with approximately 40 member countries. These member countries exercise an extensive exchange of information and experience, especially between the Nordic countries. For more information visit www.byggtjeneste.no.
About Osiris Data
Osiris Data - a Microsoft and Coextant Business Partner - has offices in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, and Sweden. Osiris Data specializes in complex solutions within the areas of Portal, Knowledge Management, Web and .NET object-oriented programming for Windows and Microsoft SQL. With multiple successful deployments of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, Osiris Data has become one of Microsoft's "go-to" partners for SharePoint Portal Server implementations in Norway. For more information visit www.osiris.no.