WHAT IS WHAM?

Automated Workplace Safety's WHAM is easy to use software that helps safety professionals capture, maintain, publish and share hazard identification and assessment information required for OSHA compliance. In short WHAM is a safety documentation producer. WHAM Software helps your safety and production people produce high quality, OSHA compliant documents without all the hassles of document formatting, cutting and pasting, proper file naming and filing. You might think of WHAM as the fast and user-friendly data entry/document creating applications that:

• Create compliant documents just by filling out the interview fields
• Give you complete control over the style and format of output documents and web pages. We ship the program with several sample templates to demonstrate this capability.
  • Refer to the "templates" section of our help file and you’ll get an idea of why we are becoming so popular with large corporate safety organizations. Each facility, departments, job categories or even individual users can produce customized output "look and feel" with special formatting, logos or letterheads while retaining the correct corporate words in the documents. This is invaluable in multi-national and multi-subsidiary companies. These applications are sophisticated in document creation using simple templates created with your RTF word processor and html editor. This is not simple Crystal Reports out of database queries! Try it.

• Have fast pop-up "databases" (not RDBMS's) of standard safety terms which can be customized per user just by them clicking "remember this" (really the Edit Database) buttons
• Perform completely within your network security
• Put the safety teams word processors on steroids.

AWS’s WHAM products are Windows 32-bit "fat client" applications and conform 100% to the WIN32 API. Demos install and execute completely free on as many Windows95+ or WindowsNT/4.0+ machines as you wish. The demo version is actually the real program with a limit on the size of the document that can be produced. If you certify this demo version, you are certifying the real thing. WHAM products must be registered with AWS on each client PC wishing to execute the full licensed capabilities. We enable the fully capable Professional version or less-capable Desktop version by providing a registration code via email after receiving a credit card or P.O. (See Help/About/Register). All the latest WHAM software, patches and additional information are available at www.whamnet.com in either our "Downloads" or "Support" pages. We invite you to install the demo version. Installation may run from any network shared drive. It is an InstallShield setup and has a full uninstall.

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW

• WHAM products operate 100% within the win32 API and is completely Y2K compliant if you are at Windows 95/OSR2+ or NT4.0 SP3+. All dates show with full ISO Y2K YYYY-MM-DD format.

• WHAM products operate on ASCII flat files (see WHAM FILE SYSTEM later in this overview) and are fully compliant with your network security. There are no hidden files or databases or user logons that circumvent your security (or add to it) in any way. If you grant a user "read-only" permission to a network share which contains a WHAM "library" holding our files and/or documents (which were produced by a user with write access), then the WHAM docs are read-only to that user. The user can only see network shares you allow. Therefore, they can retrieve a file from a remote library but only store in their authorized libraries.

• End users (only those who are actually document Producers) usually end up creating and re-recreating WHAM files, Rich Text Format word processing documents and HTML WEB pages in large corporations. If these documents are stored on common network "Safety shares" and Web servers, rather than their local hard disk, they require NETBIOS "create", "update", "delete" access for files and directories. All other document readers require no update permissions.

• WHAM products use a very small memory footprint and runs easily on any PC that can run Windows95/98/ME/XP or WindowsNT. The vast majority of the install is actually checking for the proper version of Windows modules. The actual program directories are only about 5 MB.

• WHAM does not modify the user’s registry in any way other than the installation entries for uninstall. The user preferences are kept in a traditional ".ini" file in the program directory. You never have to worry about us wiping out a registry.

THE WHAM FILE SYSTEM

First, let’s discuss why WHAM doesn’t use merchant RDBMS's such as Access, SQL/Server, Oracle, Sybase, etc.

Keep in mind that WHAM, as a document creation tool, is about free-form text, not logical orderly rows and columns of uniform data. Many fields may be null or contain from one to thousands of bytes of text, including tabs, linefeeds, or carriage returns.

Some of our customers require that WHAM applications run completely stand-alone on a laptop in the field. A typical situation involves safety employees or contracted consultants who are watching operations and making real-time modifications to WHAM procedures. They are actually modifying "safety words" and immediately producing new hazard identification, audit, or survey documents based on new observations. After updating the procedures, they usually leave a copy of the newly modified WHAM library for the safety team at the facility. Safety Managers also routinely wish to e-mail a single new procedure to other sites or to a plant contractor when they get back to your LAN or a phone line. At the same time, our flat file architecture works quickly and easily when implemented on a file or web server to facilitate information sharing. This file system allows each user and each company to decide the ideal way for WHAM to meet the user needs and operate within existing IT infrastructure. We have designed these products to give you choices, not to demand that you solve problems "our way."

We are sure that you know these folks are safety people, not IT people. They are often not well versed in the nuances and implications of exporting and importing RDBMS rows output from queries and bulk copies with complicated search criteria. We are not saying that you cannot do these things with RDBMS's, but the applications tend to become much larger and more complicated for the end users and his or her workstation. Also sharing of data between databases becomes a matter of sophisticated replication or pre-canned procedures (and there’s never the right one!) that is not at all easy to turn on and off selectively. Our files are copied and moved just by dragging and dropping individual files, folders or even entire libraries.

There are also many timesaving features and searches that we provide to make simple end-user actions emulate complex DML on a database. Here’s an example: Install WHAM on your PC if you haven’t already. Now notice we put a little library in your "My Documents\AWS_WHAM" folder. Use Windows Explorer and go there. You’ll see a sub-folder called "Your Facilities.fac" or something close to that. Simply rename that folder to the corporate nickname of the location you work at now and be sure to end it with ".fac". Now go into WHAM-JSA and File/Open/Existing JSA and just go into your new folder, then a department .fac folder and a category .cat folder. Now, open the sample JSA file. Look at the Facility in the header screen. Go to the Print Center and send that sample file to your web browser. Look at the facility in the actual output! Pick another web template and do it again. It’s that easy for users to share, rename, reorganize and clone. You’re probably realizing the power of options made available to the user with Windows features (which they work with every day) rather than having to learn a new and potentially more complicated WHAM(SQL) way to do that simple reorganization. The files are so compact that the data for an entire facility can usually fit on a floppy disk. An entire library from "Corpus Christy Refinery 4" can be zipped up and sent to "Beaumont Refinery 7" as a small email attachment. It can then be unzipped and have one folder renamed and be printing documents with Beaumont filled in and in Beaumont’s look and feel (using Beaumont's output templates). All in a matter of minutes by the end user. Some fields get their values based on the file name and location each time the file is opened.

Now, one more point: Open Systems. Go into the library again and find that .jsa file. Rename it to a .txt file and open it. No voodoo. No magic. It’s your safety words. Line 1 is the header and lines 2 through x are the detail steps. We use the pipe "|" as a field separator as tabs and commas are very common inside our fields. We don’t hold your data hostage in an undocumented database schema or encrypt it in any way. If a better product comes along kick us out, convert the "words" to their format and you’re converted.

You may create a WHAM file "library" anywhere you wish on a local disk of any type or a network share by simply creating one or more files there named xxxxLibrary.txt where xxxx varies with the type of WHAM files you will allow to be created in this library. This library "anchor point" file prevents WHAM files from accidentally being saved all over the network. A user "changes" libraries by finding and opening this file with the "change library" command. The text inside the file then becomes the "sign" displayed to them when they complete the command. For example, the text itself is the "welcome mat" and the file is the "door" to the "library."

The flat file system may now make a lot more sense to you. There is a lot of code behind that simplicity. We put the work on us, not you. In addition, later releases of WHAM products will be filing live XML. AWS will never ask you to use one and only one browser or JVM. So we are staying 1 – fat client but, 2 – able to print web pages for subscribers and 3 – very proud of our flat file system.

We hope you agree.

If you have any questions, please contact us at: support@whamnet.com