Fountain - FAQs
Q. What is Fountain?
Fountain is Hyperspheric's system for providing secure, integrated on-line workspaces for
sharing data, information, knowledge and expertise within and between teams. If you are a member of a
Fountain website you can be an active team member wherever you have a web connection.
Q. What sort of information can we share?
Members of a Fountain site can share pretty-much any type of electronic document
(DOC, PDF, XLS, GIFs, JPG etc), links to web pages, contact details and calendar events.
They can also create their own web pages, add knowledge-base articles, run their own blogs
and participate in the forum. The types of information that Fountain supports is growing all the time.
Q. Who can benefit from Fountain?
- Individual networks, teams or organisations who are yet to establish a
web site for sharing information with each other or who are looking to revamp their web site.
- Groups of networks, teams or organisation who need to share information but
who do not have resources available to develop interoperable web sites from scratch or to make
their existing sites interoperable.
- Teams or organisations who want a convenient, cost-effective,
standards-compliant mechanism of publishing and sharing information on the web.
Q. Will my Fountain site be secure?
Yes, you can have a "closed" site that allows only members to access it, or an "open" site that allows
public access to the content that you want to make available on the Internet but still keeps restricted
content secure.
Q. Which web browsers is Fountain compatible with?
Fountain has been developed to meet the latest web standards, such as XHTML and CSS. Any browsers
that follow these standards should be compatible with Fountain.
Q. How does Fountain differ from other online collaboration systems?
Although Fountain can be used by anyone, it is specially designed to meet the needs of organisations
that have an interest in adhering to public standards and statutory obligations.
Q. Does Fountain follow public standards for metadata?
Yes – Fountain holds e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) and Dublin-Core compliant metadata.
Q. Some of our information is protected by the Data Protection Act, but some
needs to be made available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. Can Fountain help us with this?
Yes – there are several ways Fountain can help in these circumstances. Please contact us to discuss the various options.
Q. What about the Disability Discrimination Act - is Fountain accessible?
Yes - Fountain has been developed to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines standards (v1.0 and v2.0).
Q. Can information within Fountain be tagged?
Yes - Fountain allows the use of formal classification schemes with structures such as lists, trees and
thesauri and it also allows informal tagging using keywords. Please contact us to check whether Fountain
supports your preferred classification scheme, e.g. the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) or the
National Public Health Language (NPHL).
Q. Can Fountain "talk" to other systems?
Yes, it should be possible for us to create a "connector" to allow Fountain to search pretty-much any
online system that is searchable using a SOAP-based web service.
Q. Can we use our own domain name, e.g. http://www.mysite.org.uk/?
Yes, but you will need to change your DNS entry to point to our servers. We can advise you on how to go about this.
Q. Is Fountain a safe place for our information?
Yes – our servers are in a secure data centre and are backed up every night to an off-site location. All uploaded files are automatically virus-checked, too.
Q. How much does Fountain cost?
The cost will depend upon the amount of data that you want to store and the number of users you have.
Please contact us for the pricing information.
Q. How can I find out more?
To discuss what Fountain can do for you, please call Jonathan Brenchley on 01223 507454 or email
, or view
our Case Studies for Fountain (Milton Keynes intelligence Observatory and Tees Public Health),
or download our Datasheet about Fountain.