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NOAA Connects Offices Around the
World and Speeds GIS
Development Project With e/pop Web & Video Conferencing
Weather-related disasters have always made headline
news, but weather and climate has become even more
critical now that we have access to data that confirms,
and in some cases, even predicts the effects of global
warming and other man-made damage to the earth’s
ecosystem. New technology has helped meteorologists and
other experts more accurately predict when certain
weather-related emergencies, such as hurricanes and
tornadoes, will occur. In the U.S., we depend on one
federal agency more than any other to supply this data.
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce, is
responsible for “taking the pulse of the planet.” NOAA
provides information that pertains to the state of the
oceans and the atmosphere. This is generally done with
the production of weather warnings and forecasts through
the National Weather Service, but NOAA’s information
services extend to climate, ecosystems and commerce as
well. NOAA provides accurate and objective scientific
information about the ecosystems, including coastal and
marine ecosystems, climate and weather/water, providing
data and forecasts for weather and water cycle events,
including storms, droughts and floods.
NOAA employs approximately 13,000 people, many located
in exotic and remote parts of the world, including
America Samoa, Alaska, the South Pole and Mauna Loa,
Hawaii, to name a few. NOAA’s Safety & Environmental
Compliance Office (SECO), headquartered in Silver
Spring, Maryland, is responsible for the NOAA-wide
guidelines and procedures to implement federal, state,
and local statutes and regulations. It also develops
policies and working procedures for promoting safety and
environmental compliance, and develops program goals and
objectives in order to help satisfy these procedures.
This office within NOAA sought an easy way to
communicate via online meetings in real-time with
coworkers in other NOAA offices quickly and reliably.
Will Freeman, a program manager in the SECO, found e/pop
the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth from Tom
Simon, a coworker at SECO. After a short trial, Freeman
and Simon discovered that e/pop Web and Video
Conferencing had all the features they sought, including
application, document and desktop sharing. Multiparty
video is an added bonus that allows all conference
attendees to ‘meet and greet’ colleagues. To start
reaping the benefits of web and video conferencing right
away, it was easier for NOAA and SECO to utilize e/pop
as a hosted service from WiredRed Software. SECO was
able to use e/pop immediately without standing up a
conferencing server.
Freeman and Simon, along with the rest of the SECO
employees, are able to connect easily with anyone
throughout NOAA, regardless of their location or time
zone. Most NOAA offices utilize a high speed Internet
connection that makes the web conferencing experience
more fluid.
“The flexibility and affordability of e/pop made it that
much more of an easy sell,” said Freeman. “If we want to
have a meeting or training session, we simply send a
link to all attendees and they click on that link at the
designated time. We’ve found that it’s so much simpler
to show someone than just tell them on the phone – and
it saves a lot of time.”
While e/pop comes in handy for internal meetings and
training the field personnel on energy tracking software
applications, one of the main objectives for e/pop was
to assist with an ongoing Geographic Information System
(GIS) application development project that is being
managed by Freeman, who is located in Silver Spring, MD
and Simon who is located in Seattle, WA.
The goal of the SECO GIS project is to implement a
standardized, spatially referenced asset information
management and distribution system that will manage NOAA
assets.
“One huge project bottleneck was the ability to share
the very large GIS project files,” explained Freeman.
“It was impossible to zip and email them, and .ftp
didn’t work well either. This was a big problem that was
really slowing down the progress of this project. e/pop
is used as an effective communication tool between users
and developers to share ideas and troubleshoot
problems.”
e/pop’s document, application and desktop sharing
feature allows multiple conference attendees to share
not only documents, but even highly complex,
industry-specific applications, such as Computer-Aided
Design (CAD) drawings or GIS mapping and analysis
applications without having to install the application
on each individual PC.
While ease-of-use is always important, NOAA has no lack
of technical expertise. The bureau employs thousands of
meteorologists, oceanographers, and other scientists who
research, track and interpret the data that NOAA
disperses to its customers, through its Line Offices,
such as the NOAA National Weather Service.
“For us, how easy it is to use is less important than
how reliable it is,” said Freeman. “e/pop works well,
every time, and it certainly comes in handy when we need
to meet with coworkers from our remote locations around
the globe.”
“It’s kind of like having a mobile phone these days.
Once we started using e/pop we really can’t do without
it,” he added.
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