Is Anybody Watching?

The goal of any publishing venture is to establish a direct connection between the producers and the consumers of information. That's the raison d'être for most intranets: As Web content gets published, anybody with access to a Web browser can receive it. This might be a quantum leap over the rigid information systems of the past, but some VARs say that it's only a beginning.

"What's lacking is a publish-and-subscribe metaphor that can handle not just publication, but delivery of relevant information tailored to individual needs," says Bryan Menell, customer-man agement-initiative leader at BSG. Menell and 65 other people in BSG's Customer Management group are chartered with creating customer-service and sales-automation solutions, many of them built around the Customer Asset Ma nagement family of tools from Vantive. "Our charter is to supply turnkey, Web-enabled customer-management solutions that offer proactive notification of important information and events," Menell explains.

Consider the interplay between the sales and support teams at most organizations. Sales reps need to be continually made aware of problems within their regions. But because technical support is handled by another department, and because many sales reps work far from headquarters, communication about these problems sometimes doesn't occur until it's too late.

"When customers spend all day on the phone trying to get a problem resolved, there's nothing worse than a sales rep calling to try and sell them something," Menell says. "Yet this happens a lo t more often than most companies would like to admit."

The solution? Don't ask sales reps to go looking for the information they need; let the information find them. Menell and his colleagues are establishing the infrastructure for such a cross-departmental interplay with a new product from Dazel, called MetaWeb. This product is an add-on to the Dazel Output Server product line, a server-based infrastructure for delivering and managing output from client/server and desktop applications to a variety of destinations in the enterprise, including printers, faxes, pagers, files, e-mail addresses -- and now the Web.

Users and applications directly publish information to the Web by putting it in designated MetaWeb InfoBoxes -- information repositories set up on intranet Web sites. From there, the information gets formatted and propagated automatically to all individuals who subscribe to it. Sales representatives, for example, might choose to subscribe to reports on priority-one tech nical-support problems occurring in their regions.

Vantive Customer Asset Management software can generate reports from the data entered by technical-support personnel or from embedded business rules. The reports are picked up by the Dazel Output Server, which ensures that each type of document receives the necessary transformation for its intended destination -- such as HTML and PDF formats for the Web, or PostScript for laser printers.

From there, MetaWeb distributes those reports to the appropriate InfoBoxes, which are tied to specific URLs. Because InfoBoxes are server based, they can receive information automatically whether or not their owners are on-line. Important events can trigger reactions, such as an immediate notification of an InfoBox's owner via e-mail, a pager, or a pop-up window on his or her screen.

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Interdepartmental Communication

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