Forest EMS Support Systems

Forest's EMS Template

As a follow-up after last week's phone conference, I'm trying to come up with a list of what a forest's ems template should require.  There would be a central WO website with general information about EMS (which already exists) linked to regional websites, linked to forests.

The Forest-level EMS template should include:

• an index list of 17 elements with hot links
• automatically list the files once they are available
• be easy for forests to update
• appear as one site (with other forests) as seamlessly as possible for the user
• incorporate the EMS Guide
• should provide a structure and organization of documents held to standard naming conventions

Someone had mentioned the USGS -Biological Survey site as an example to follow.  Can someone post a link of the specific site?  There are a few different sites, not sure which one to look at.

-matt

EMS Software: Why re-invent the wheel?

There are several companies that sell software, (mostly to buisnesses) for managing their EMS.  I am aware of two companies:  Greenware and Intelex.  GreenWare is used by the EPA (for facilities), and seems to be the better solution of the two for our purposes.  Intelex also has a program, but it is more focused on chemical companies and such, rather than the broader environmental issues that the FS deals.

We should at least eliminate this as a possible solution before we go on inventing our own methods.

While we are spending lots of employee time and contractor money struggling with building EMSs from scratch, there seems to be a real advantage to taking something that already works. We could be using the industry standard.  We could build it quicker.  We would have a system in place to manage documents, helping us organize better.  It would help with publishing documents online.  It could possibly help with sharing documents with other forests (I need to look into this further).

On the other hand, there are advantages to building our own systems:  more buy-in from the forests, we can customize our EMS to better fit the FS needs, and possibly a better overall understanding of EMS.

GreenWare does a good job pitching their product, with an ability to make it web-based and being customizable. Does it measure up? Not sure yet, but I would like to test the software--if nothing else it might give us some ideas about how we need to organize and maintain documents for our websites.

You can download a copy of their powerpoint presentation from their website: http://www.greenware.com/fsr.asp?surl=%2Fproducts%2Fdownloads%2Easp

Their web-based product is at: http://erp.greenware.com/

-matt