The NASA Insider intranet website helps employees at 11 facilities stay updated on, among other things, office closings, evacuation procedures and safe arrival to work
Laurie Sullivan, InformationWeek
The American space agency NASA (NASA) is upgrading the services offered on the website designed for emergencies, in preparation for the hurricane season that officially begins on June 11. The NASA Insider intranet site, which is based on Vignette's Next Generation Web Presence platform, helps employees at XNUMX facilities stay updated on, among other things, office closings, evacuation procedures and safe arrival to work. On the website, the employees are also called to notify by phone as soon as they arrive safe and sound in the Hafcem district.
About half of the space agency's offices are located in the exact path of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year, says Jean Holm, senior information manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts 13 to 16 storms this year, and estimates that eight to ten of them may develop into hurricanes and four to six of them into extremely dangerous, category three hurricanes.
The NASA intranet website also automatically displays warnings of other natural disasters, such as fires, tornadoes, floods, tsunamis and earthquakes. The US Department of Homeland Security helps publish warnings against terrorist attacks, and in total the site is fed from about 130 sources of information. According to Holm, the Vignette company's tool makes it very easy to combine the various sources of information and linking the site to any external source of information takes only three minutes.
Employees can access the site remotely, via VPN communication, from almost any device connected to the Internet, such as RIM's Blackberry or Palm's Trio devices. NASA employees who are unable to access the website can call a call center and be updated on gas supply or accommodation arrangements, for example. "The budget for the project amounted to approximately 300,000 dollars this year," says Holm, although this amount does not include the software of the Vignette company whose purchase was made directly by the department of NASA's Chief Information Officer.
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