Hot Comms Concepts

Companies, people, automated systems, friends and colleagues are bombarding us wtih a continual stream of information - some of it good, some of it less so. As employers we are bound by the needs of the business to ensure that our valuable staff are familier with and understand the information required to accomplish the tasks set by business owners, managers, peers, the legal authorities, other stakholders and themselves.

The amount of information is bewildering and comes in an unordered array of styles, media and channels. Someone, you perhaps, has the task of making sure that everyone in your business has access to the right information, when and where they need it and without having to search endlessly through piles of memos, journals, books, invoices, CDs, memory sticks and other 'stuff'.

Hot Comms cannot answer all the issues that this plethora of data will present, but it does go a long way to ensuring that once you and your team have filtered the information, you can store it and find it for the long term benefit of your business. This function alone can save you time and money and the sanity of all your people.

The two essentials in Hot Comms are Store and Search. In principle, if you can store it you can search for it. If you can find it and read it Hot Comms has done its job.

Hot Comms stores your information in a variety of formats. Some of these are described below. Other formats may be required in the future - Hot Comms is designed to accomodate new formats, new concepts and new types of information. It would be a bit presumptious to assume Hot Comms can cater for 'anything', but the design is such that it can accomodate a lot.

Here are the current content types that Hot comms will store for you, right from the start:

• News Articles - exactly as they say on the tin - straight forward short news items that anyone can create.
• Basic Pages - this is basically a web page just like any other web page. We call it a Basic Page to differentiate from other content types because, in reality, every content type is a web page, just with different formatting, sorting, fields etc which are relevant to each particular content type.
• Blog entries - just like any other blog but in Hot Comms they are private and can be posted to one or more specific teams, thereby enabling a vet blog stream or a reception blog stream. The key advantage of the blog stream is that each member of staff is probably more interested in blogs related to their team rather than other teams.
• Documents - documents that you upload o Hot Comms to make available to the whole team
• Events - a calendar for every practice event
• Forum Topics - typcially used for create clinical protocols and recording meeting agendas and minutes - can also be used for any forum on any topic, e.g. conditions, breeds, training etc.
• To Do Items - anything you like to record as something that needs doing, and marked as new or done.
• Surveys
• Private Messages
• Web Forms