Oracle portal gives Peace chance to simplify operations

By ADAM GIFFORD

Staff at utility billing specialist Peace Software will in future do much of their work through an Oracle-based online portal starting this month.

Information director Peter Muggleston said the existing intranet was not up to the task of servicing the information needs of 450 employees now spread across New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada.

"As we have grown, maintaining the intranet has become very labour intensive for IT staff," Muggleston said.

"We went looking for a knowledge management solution. We found that the Oracle9i Application Server with the Oracle portal meant we could not only do document management but, out of the box, we could replace our intranet and extranet with something end-users could configure and control the content of without going through the IT team.

"For example, if you are in a testing team you can own any content published about testing procedures."

He said the portal would eliminate the need for Peace staff or implementation partners to send one another large documents as email attachments, as documents would be stored centrally in the database.

"It used to be all right for teams to share files in local areas, but we now have a lot more people travelling, the way we manage teams is different and they need to be able to collaborate wherever they are. With the portal, all they will need is a browser."

Because documents will be saved to an Oracle9i database rather than on file servers, indexing will be improved. The Oracle9i Application Server includes the Oracle Internet File System, which indexes, tracks file changes and automatically updates documents so that employees always access the most recent version.

Users will be able to specify who has authority to access the documents and the level of security required. The portal will eventually be integrated with the Oracle Financials and Human Resources modules Peace uses.