Some of you may have seen me present on the ABB Risk Based Inspection System that FoCul have developed and maintained ABB over the last 10 years. It has been fantastically successful and has contributed over $3 million to efficiency savings for ABB and their customers.
ABB have recognised the additional benefits that XPages can bring and we are now working on a new version of the application. The reason for the move to XPages included :
> A much more modern look and feel
> The ability to bring customers in via a browser offering and still use local replicas
> Multilingual capabilities
> Configurable forms
> In-line charting
> Reduction in replication conflicts through using multiple data sources on forms
There are certainly some challenges along the way but it will be a great system and will give us some great things to blog about.
The XWork server announced by Ed Brill will also be a very useful tool in allowing ABB to deploy this product to their customers as intranet applications.
In the past exploratory discussions around the opportunity to do this kind of thing were always couched in vague terms and we had to work very hard not to confuse the line of business users with “virtual servers” and the dreaded PVU.
Now it is simple – yes absolutely Mr Customer, your customers can run this application platform on their site with no restrictions for about $2000 per year – it doesn’t get much simpler than that.
p.s. thanks to the XPages team for speeding up XPages in the Notes Client in 8.5.3, the project wouldn’t have flown without that.