So after my last post about winning the Honorable Mention in the Windows IT Pro Innovators awards for our Hale Ikena solution the question was posed to me....what the heck is a Hale Ikena?

Well, Hale Ikena, in Hawaiian, loosely translates to "Room with a View" and we use it to describe our knowledge collaboration system which is intended to give our people a complete "view" of what our clients have and need.  It's based upon Microsoft OneNote 2007 which we have installed on all of our tablet PCs.

I'll elaborate more on it in a future post, if people want me to, but the basics of it are this:

We have a shared notebook called "Clients" stored on a secured network server.  Each of our users has opened that notebook and thus has a cached copy located on their local hard drive.  Any changes they make to the notebook are automatically and transparently synchronized back to/from the central copy on the server whenever they connect to the server with OneNote open.

Within the Clients notebook we have a section for each client and within each section we have pages for Open Issues, Billing Notes, pages for each of their servers and machines, a page with General information and sometimes pages for specific applications or issues the client has in use or has experienced.

We frequently capture screen shots, drag and drop content from websites, research issues, post event log errors and collaborate on problems or ideas within the product.  We can do it with ink or typing, we can insert photos (which we do often; taking pictures of a client's server rack with our digital camera phone for instance) we can even record and insert audio if we choose to.

Powerful stuff, easy to deploy and it has made us much more effective in assisting out clients.  I'll try to detail some more things about OneNote and Hale Ikena in upcoming posts.

-B-