Platinum Technology Inc, the Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois- based open enterprise software vendor noted for its 29 acquisitions over two years, has settled down to release a new version of its Apriori help desk automation software. Originally the fruit of Platinum’s Answer Systems Inc acquisition of last year (CI No 2,640) – now called the Answer Systems Laboratory – Apriori Hands-Free now boasts problem resolution capabilities using electronic mail, World Wide Web Internet and Intranet technology. Louise Kirkbride, general manager of the Laboratory, described it as a general flexible tool that provides solutions to the whole environment. She stressed that Apriori Hands-Free was not trying to replace humans within help desk management, but was instead a workflow and workgroup application that would act as the group memory for the enterprise. Central, literally, to Apriori’s functionality is the POEMS Platinum Open Enterprise Management System (CI No 2,608); built up over a period to include applications inherited from Platinum’s various acquisitions such as the former DataDictionary/Solution extensible repository from Brownstone Solutions Inc (CI No 2,790) and relational-based repository technology from Reltech Group Inc (CI No 2,640) – now integrated and called the Platinum Repository/Open Enterprise Edition tool set – POEMS has Apriori sitting at the front end, complete with World Wide Web graphical user interface, accessing knowledge bases that have been developed by the user company. Apriori motivates the holders of knowledge to pass it down, reckons Ms Kirkbride. The idea is that users access Apriori either from the company Web page, downloading the required documents directly from the Web, or via electronic mail. In the latter case, the user sends a message describing the problem to the help desk’s address which Apriori reads, responding by forwarding a list of documents to match the problem described.
Bubble-Up technology
The user selects the most relevant titles from the list and sends a request back to Apriori, which then replies to the user with the full documentation. The software features Platinum’s patented Bubble-Up technology, which searches the knowledge bases for the most useful or most frequently offered responses to queries. Ms Kirkbride described this as a process in which Bubble-Up moves the most useful solutions of today to the first problem resolution screen. Should Apriori be unable to find the solution, it then routes the problem to the support staff along with details of the steps taken so far to resolve the problem. Apriori runs under Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc implementations of Unix; it will be available for Microsoft Corp Windows NT and SQL Server in the autumn, while at the client end, it is up under OS/2, Windows 3.X, Windows95 and NT client. There are no plans for a Mac OS version at present. UK marketing communications manager Caroline Taylor wished to stress that although the company has chosen to implement Apriori on the most popular versions of Unix, Platinum could quite easily convert the software for other, smaller versions such as Digital Equipment Corp’s brand inside six weeks at our labs in the US. Apriori, along with other Platinum products has just been awarded Hewlett-Packard OpenView certification (CI No 2,891).
