GeoQuest has been showing its collaborative document authoring solution MindShare for a while – PDM first covered the product in May this year. At that time (PDM Vol 5 N° 5) we also reported on a new tool ‘ReactivWeb’ - knowledge management software that Badley Earth Sciences had developed following its success with Open Journal. Now, Mike Badley has re-baptized ReactivWeb as ‘Unite IT’ and spun off a new company ‘Collaborative Technology’ (CT) to market the new software. Unite IT provides both a software environment and tools where users, connected by any type of network and using the same or different computer platforms, can create and capture content, organize, share, personalize and publish information and data. CT’s first client is – you’ve guessed, Schlumberger-GeoQuest which will be deploying Unite IT as the MindShare document editing and management engine.
Hanley
PDM had a preview of MindShare from GeoQuest’s Samantha Hanley. The software is a multi-user, multi platform digital library and document management tool. Running in client server mode, MindShare uses a “fat” client (i.e. it does not just run in an internet browser). The client software shows a split screen with a tree view of folders and documents on the left, and a document viewing and editing pane on the right. All elements of the viewer, and indeed the document repository structure, and the documents themselves can be pre-configured through corporate templates.
Drag’n drop
Text, sound and video clips can be dragged and dropped onto tree nodes to create a data/document model. The document itself can be a composite of text (from Office documents), data or images. Security and object sharing technology allows locks down to individual data items within the document. Currently the images are not live – i.e. there is no tie-in to live data feeds or databases, but this will happen in a future version. MindShare will be available early in 2001. More from www.slb.com and www.collabortech.com.
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