AWWA IMTECH51431

Due to both familiarity with and the open design of web-based technologies, development of intranets to present electronic documentation and data has grown in popularity with utilities. Providing access to documents and data through an intranet allows the scalable organization of disparate information relevant to the operations, maintenance and management of the utility. Once developed, these applications may be accessed through the use of a web browser from many different platforms. While the advantages of intranet access are compelling, there are several significant issues which must be addressed for a robust installation. A utility intranet is essentially a web site which must be designed for both ease of initial construction as well as on-going maintenance. As the content of the web site grows, the number of pages can grow exponentially, leading to difficult maintenance issues. For example, equipment operation and maintenance manuals are typically entered in a single HTML file which must be edited whenever information changes. Furthermore, much of this information already exists in the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). A more robust approach is to maintain equipment information in the CMMS database, and use that same database as a source for generating the relevant operation and maintenance manual pages. This paper presents methods that allow for such an implementation and compares their respective costs and capabilities.