Fountain - An Integrated Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Networking System
Fountain is Hyperspheric's integrated knowledge management, collaboration and networking system.
It is designed to meet the needs of professionals and organisations who need to share information,
knowledge and expertise with colleagues, partner organisations and/or the public.
Each Fountain web site provides a secure, branded, online workspace for storing and sharing
documents, contact details, event information, and many other types of information, too.
For Organisations
Fountain is designed to help organisations take control of their information and knowledge.
- Consolidation - Establish a single, branded presence for your organisation’s news, publications, contact information, blogs, forum, etc.
- Syndication - Publicise new content through automatic news/RSS feeds and through blogging tools.
- Organisation - Organise content through the use of e-GMS/Dublin Core metadata and classification schemes.
- Content Management - Empower selected users to add web pages using the built-in content management system (CMS) and wiki tools.
- Continuity and Efficiency - Capture your organisation’s knowledge through the built-in knowledge base and forum.
- Partnership working - Improve partnership working through a single, shared workspace or through controlled access to each other’s workspaces.
- Standards - Address the requirements of the e-GIF and the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).
For Users
- Access documents - Share useful documents and bookmarks and maintain your own list of favourites.
- Network - Share contact information and manage your own profile.
- Meetings and conferences - Share details of events via the online calendar, and link agendas, minutes, presentations and other outputs to them.
- Contextualisation - Add insight, structure and context to information by creating themed "collections", adding metadata and links between content.
- Discussion - Discuss issues in the forum to avoid decisions being lost in closed "email silos".
- Blogging - Subscribe to blogs and/or run your own.
- Share your expertise - Help colleagues by recording useful procedures etc in the knowledge base, or add and contribute to FAQs using the Content Management System and wiki tools.
- Seamless access - To support knowledge workers involved in projects that span organisational boundaries,
a single user account can be used to access and search all of a user's workspaces. There is no need to log on multiple times.
Branding and Customisation
Fountain allows each site to use its own colour scheme, logos and other assets to tie in with your own branding needs.
Individual portal pages can be created and customised to meet the needs of specific users, groups and partner organisations.
The screen shots show a variety of colour schemes and layouts in use by existing sites.
New Features Coming Soon
We are continually improving and extending Fountain. The following developments are currently underway:
- Personalisation - To allow users to design their own home pages.
- Datasets - To allow users to upload datasets, such as geographical indicators.
- Charts - To allow users to visualise uploaded datasets.
- Thematic Maps - To allow users to view thematic maps of geographically-tagged data.
Editions
- Public Sector Edition - The Public Sector edition of Fountain is designed specifically
for organisations such as Observatories and networks of knowledge workers. It addresses issues such as
e-GMS and
e-GIF compliance,
and the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).
- Charity Edition - The Charity Edition will be identical to the Public Sector Edition, but will be available at a reduced cost to registered charities.
- Project Edition (coming soon) - The Project Edition will have a monthly pricing structure for short-lived worksapces.
- Trial Edition (coming soon) - The Trial Edition will be free, but will have various features disabled.
Want More Information?
- View our Case Studies for Fountain: Milton Keynes intelligence Observatory and Tees Public Health .
- Download our Datasheet about Fountain.