ES Designs recently released webScheduler, a web-based scheduler/calendar for tracking meetings, deadlines and appointments. With webScheduler your project team can access a project schedule from nearly anywhere on the Internet. webScheduler is one part of a suite of tools designed to assist collaboration on projects. These tools will not only help geoscientists, but anyone working on projects where resources are scattered and up-to-date information is essential.

webScheduler will also be an integral part of Collaborator, an enhanced tool that not only allows schedule tracking, but also provides tools for document control and web document updates via email. With Collaborator, you can generate web documents, check them out for editing, email the edits back to a web server which checks them in and updates a site with the edited document. You can find out more about webScheduler on the Products & Services page. We will provide more information on Collaborator as it is refined.

There has not been much progress on the webGIS tools in the last couple of months. With personal commitments, ES Designs collaborative efforts, and work on both webScheduler and Collaborator, improvements and bug fixes to webGIS have been slow. I am planning some major effort on this in the coming weeks. Be looking for a number of new features in this suite, including offline data collection via a Newton-based web browser. You can also look for a name change since someone else has a webGIS product.

ES Designs collaborative efforts with Environmental Information Management Systems (EIMS) and EDAW, Inc. are going forward. Under the EIMS * EDAW umbrella, we made a presentation to a environmental/mining consulting firm early in December and are currently developing a proposal to implement the EIMS data management system.

I hope to provide more information on this collaborative effort as it bears fruit. In the meantime, check out the Products & Services page to learn more about webGIS, webScheduler and other services provided by ES Designs.

I have added a new essay on generating web sites. It is pretty generic but contains what I believe is an important point to keep in mind when building web sites. Namely that web sites are computer programs and should follow a development stratagy. See the link below.