technology

Global customers in healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services trust eOptimize to solve their scheduling problems. We reliably deliver the results these customers need with innovative and scalable solutions that can handle thousands of appointment scheduling events a day.

Our AboutTime solutions are architected to enable the enterprise of today and the future to have robust scalability and flexible deployment support of dynamic scheduling solutions. These solutions facilitate better communication between enterprise personnel and partners, so the enterprise can respond quickly to developing challenges and deploy quickly to create new opportunities.

Better Together

One way we deliver real business value is to help clients make better use of what they already have. For example, we’ve built line-of-business applications into Exchange Server, so clients can realize new value from their existing calendar (free/busy) repository. Our scheduling engines are able to dynamically evaluate resource availability within Exchange, and persist scheduling solutions back into Exchange calendars. Users receive updates right inside their Outlook or Outlook Web Access (OWA) calendars, so they can do more with their familiar Outlook experience - anytime, anywhere.

AboutTime also dovetails very effectively with all components of Microsoft Office System via the Office Web Services Toolkit. This convergence between enterprise-class informatics solutions and the most commonly used knowledge worker toolkit bridges the gap between operations and management. Knowledge workers can now create Office documents - such as Excel spreadsheets or Word mail merges – to access AboutTime solutions as dynamic data sources that deliver the most current business intelligence available. Whether the final document is an ad hoc activity chart shared on an intranet web page, or simply a form letter mail-out, empowerment for knowledge workers is the end result.

Collaboration

A comprehensive enterprise scheduling strategy must consider all aspects of enterprise operations, which include the activities of personnel and resources in centralized and remote locations, clients, and business partners. AboutTime solutions facilitate these diverse relationships by exposing Microsoft Web Services that provide easily defined and accessible collaboration points. A full set of verbs defined in the Web Service package means that any solution can participate in a rich conversation with AboutTime for Exchange Server.

Many organizations already rely upon Exchange Server as a messaging platform, but have not unlocked its full potential as a backbone for coordinating operations. Effective, efficient operations often require personnel, facilities, resources, partners, and even clients to act in concert, whether they are separated by location or organizational boundaries. AboutTime for Exchange Server’s collaboration strategy facilitates superior communication among these diverse participants, while improving opportunities for rapid adoption.

Robust Scalability

AboutTime for Exchange Server is architected as an n-tier application with browser-based Outlook Presentation Services, ensuring a light footprint on the client desktop. Built on Web Services, the system supports endless configuration options while providing business service communication across machine and corporate boundaries. Asynchronous objects release client resources quickly, while stateless compute building blocks ensure that server resources are dynamic and pooling conscious. Data and database services are built on proven, scalable solutions. Exchange Server and SQL Server host the data repository, and enable links to system events and workflow.

Security

The AboutTime security subsystem provides functional access partitions through role-based security. Data partitions are managed via organization class associations to Active Directory user profiles. The union of these two approaches is a comprehensive, manageable, and highly-customizable security strategy that allows clients to deploy our solutions with confidence in any environment.

Scheduling

Our products produce better scheduling services, because they are driven by our powerful AboutTime scheduling engines. These components maintain persistent constraint-based solution search spaces. As activity solutions are requested, domain reduction and constraint propagation quickly trim this search space to generate conflict-free options in real time:

Domain reduction is the process of reducing the search space to eliminate infeasible solutions. Eliminating infeasible solutions early in the process makes a search fast.

Constraint propagation is used to evaluate the effect of a domain reduction in one area of a search, on other areas of the same search. If two or more areas are related, this results in a cascade effect that rapidly prunes those related areas of solutions that are now known to be either infeasible, or less 'good'. In practice, this means that when an objective is specified, each progressive solution satisfies the objective better than the previous.

Used in conjunction, domain reduction and constraint propagation are very fast. Any reduction of a domain triggers rapid-fire propagation of constraints (swiftly pruning the search space), resulting in further domain reduction. This powerful combination drives the search toward superior solutions.

Resource allocation problems tend to be very complex - they involve activities that compete for limited human resources, physical constraints, and business objectives. The addition of a temporal dimension to the problem dramatically increases the size of the space that must be searched to arrive at a solution.

While optimization can used to find the ‘best’ solution to a problem, the time required to determine the perfect solution in a large search space can be prohibitive. This is the case for real time or ‘dynamic' scheduling problems, which demand superior feasible solutions in a short period of time. eOptimize employs highly-tuned dynamic scheduling algorithms so that users get good results immediately, in real time.

For our customers the results are simple. They get a solution that fits into their existing scheduling business processes that solve complex scheduling problems in seconds, instead of hours or days.

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