The US Government has mandated that all technical documentation of the Air Force be available electronically. This mandate spurred a call to defence contractors to propose solutions. This call was won by Veridian Systems of Arlington, VA. Veridian was the only one to provide a proposal that would allow the Air Force to simultaneously deploy the solution both at the enterprise level and as a standalone viewing utility.

The project was delivered ahead of schedule and is estimated to save the Air Force over $800 000 yearly. The project spurned a finished, tech order publishing solution called the Air Force Common Viewer (AFCV). A .Net application, the AFCV is currently deployed on both the E3 Sentry AWACS and F-16 weapon systems with plans to be deployed Air Force wide to over 50,000 users over the next few years.

This talk will present the facts of the case study as well as provide a technical overview of the AFCV and a live demonstration of its capabilities. The AFCV is a scalable, technical order document management tool that handles the storage, indexing and publishing of technical documentation - of any kind. It takes current SGML Air Force Tech Manuals that comply with the Air Force standard DTDs, translates them into XML, data mines and reformats the documents for electronic navigation and presentation, and delivers them to virtually any machine on the net. It is designed to be scalable from a 'wearable computer' to a web farm without any code modification. A commercial version of the AFCV will soon be available...