Boston, MA May 31, 2001 And you thought online collaboration for automobile design was cool? Well, the latest news from OpenAir, a professional services automation company, takes high-tech collaboration to a whole new level.
According to a company announcement, the da Vinci Project will use OpenAir's project management system to organize its private space launch program. The da Vinci Project is an organization of scientists and engineers working in the private sector throughout the United States and Canada. da Vinci is organizing the private space launch as a part of its participation in the X-Prize Competition, an international competition to become the first non-government organization to launch a manned rocket into space. The X-Price Competition is modeled, incidentally, after the Ortieg Prize, which resulted in Charles Lindbergh becoming the first person to successfully fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
The da Vinci project hopes to benefit from OpenAir by using the application to build and submit proposals, staff and manage the project, track employee time and expenses, create and deliver invoices, analyze key business metrics and integrate data with other systems.
OpenAir is also convenient for the space-hungry engineers because it can be used from a Palm Pilot, Windows thin client, or WAP-enabled phone.
"Our team members are scattered across North America, so to manage them I needed a centralized system they could all access," explained Operations Director Marc De Jordy. "Because OpenAir is delivered through the Web, it lets us collaborate easily. I was also able to roll it out to the team quickly, and I can add new team members as soon as they come on board. After an extensive evaluation of the alternatives, we determined that OpenAir was the only solution that was both powerful and sophisticated enough to meet our needs and intuitive enough that team members would not require extensive training," De Jordy concluded.
