New e-tool expected to aid day-to-day CE operations Published April 5, 2011 By Debbie Aragon AFCEE Public Affairs LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas -- People in the civil engineering community and those with environmental compliance responsibilities across the Air Force will soon have a new tool at their disposal to assist with day-to-day operations, according to officials at the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment. The document management and communications electronic dashboard, eDASH for short, will have environmental management system, or EMS, policies, procedures and other environmental compliance and sustainability information, as well as pages for major commands that can be easily customized to meet the mission at hand. The electronic dashboard was born from a Civil Engineering Transformation Initiative to establish a single source of information for the Air Force community, said Karen Winnie, AFCEE program manager for EMS. She said the challenge was determining how to start providing one source for a solution. To tackle the challenge, AFCEE convened a working group to look at a variety of systems already available and the possibility of developing something in house. The group ultimately selected a Sharepoint-based system very similar to what was already being used in Air Combat Command. The ACC system simply had to be tweaked a little based on research and customer recommendations, she said. The new communications tool, accessible through a ".mil" account using a common access card, will be divided into four main access areas: Accessible kNowledge for Sustainable Resources (or ANSR), Air Force Policy, Major Commands and Technical Support. ANSR provides help to users looking for answers to environmental and sustainability questions. The Air Force Policy area includes such things as civil engineering playbooks containing information on processes and standard operating procedures, a commander's corner, and regulations, policies and references. Under the Major Command tab, visitors will find customized pages containing information for each major command and their installations. The Technical Support area offers general information and help with eDASH and ANSR. Although the ANSR tab is expected to launch by late spring 2011, the entire eDASH system isn't expected to become fully operational until the end of Fiscal 2012. One very important aspect of the new system will be version control, Ms. Winnie said. "We want to make sure people will be using the most current version of regulations and policies to make sure we're all on the same sheet of music," she said. Currently, useful documents reside in several databases and many may not be the most current. "We want a single document repository. If playbooks, for example, are pulling information from one central location, that would be really important for version control and would allow updating at one location," Ms. Winnie said. With eDASH, the Web functionality and work collaboration will be a lot more agile than the Air Force portal since each major command is responsible for maintaining their own eDASH pages, she said. AFCEE officials will input and update air staff and AFCEE areas. Specific system permissions will be assigned at different levels, Ms. Winnie said, to allow updating and uploading of information. In addition to saving time and maintaining information accuracy with customers accessing one source, the centrally managed system is also expected to be much cheaper to maintain, she said, since many installations and commands currently use different, home-grown products. "eDASH will be more economical and lead to standardization across the board. A uniform approach for site content and document management will be used. This makes finding information easier when moving from one installation or major command to another," Ms. Winnie said. eDASH also provides users the opportunity to find examples of documents and policies they can use to develop their own, she added. More information on eDASH, with detailed information on the unveiling of ANSR, will be provided during the 2011 Environment, Safety and Occupational Health Training Symposium in March through classes and handouts, and thorough various avenues such as AFCEE's Centerviews magazine. The site, accessible from a military network computer, is located at https://cs.eis.af.mil/a7cportal/eDASH/default.aspx.