Bill Gates Names E-SPONDER at National Conference

Local company Convergence Communications recognized at ODC

ST. LOUIS, Feb. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- At the recent 2008 Microsoft Office
System Developer Conference (ODC) in San Jose, Microsoft Chairman and Chief
Software Architect Bill Gates was the opening keynote speaker. During his
address, he discussed programs built upon Microsoft technology and showcased
St. Louis-based Convergence Communications' E-SPONDER product. Gates
highlighted E-SPONDER as a powerful application of the rich information
organization & sharing capabilities of Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server
platform.
E-SPONDER is an incident management solution which assists first
responders and emergency management personnel in organizing and responding to
events of any size and scope. It was created for the use of police, fire/EMS,
hospital, and university organizations in the prevention, preparation,
response, and recovery from both planned events and unplanned incidents.
E-SPONDER enables these organizations to easily create incident action plans,
track personnel and resources, and manage information during an event using
both industry-standard and customer-customized forms & work processes.
E-SPONDER Alerts enables messages to be sent to thousands of contacts
instantly using voice, email and text messaging providing city-scale two-way
communications.
"[The E-SPONDER] portal can track things, can let you query these things,
can let you write up information, it can let you see organization charts and
how things are being handled. And when [first responders] have a large-scale
event, like Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl, they need this type of rich
information navigation," Gates said.
E-SPONDER is currently available in over 100 counties throughout the US
for their day-to-day emergency / public safety operations and has been used
extensively in several national security events including the 2004
Presidential Debates at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and Super
Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, Florida.
In addition to assisting responders by providing a real-time information
system during the event, E-SPONDER also helps agencies and organizations
implement the Federally-mandated Incident Command Structure (ICS) for on-scene
operations and organizes many of the ICS data gathering processes, assisting
them in becoming National Incident Management System (NIMS) and ICS compliant.
NIMS' goal of national standardization enhances interoperability & sharing
between agencies, improving safety & security for all. E-SPONDER is the key
component in many agencies' adoption of NIMS.
"That's a great example of where they are really taking the full richness
of that server level and pulling it together," Gates said.
To learn more about E-SPONDER, go to http://www.e-sponder.com/demo. To
view the video of Gates's keynote address, go to
http://wm.istreamplanet.com/customers/ms/750_microsoft_080211.asx.
Bill Gates on E-SPONDER
"[E-SPONDER uses] the extensions where you can put in new templates and
put in new logic. This is a template that was done by Convergence
Communications, and one of their customers is the Tampa Bay police department.
They take all of their information coming from mobile devices, or office
documents, or reports from the field out of forms and bring those together
into a very rich portal. So this portal can track things, can let you query
these things, can let you write up information, it can let you see
organization charts and how things are being handled. And when they have a
large-scale event, like Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl, they need this type of
rich information navigation. So you have special user interface capability at
the template level and parts capability, but it gets the full power of this
SharePoint platform for what they want to do. That's a great example of where
they are really taking the full richness of that server level and pulling it
together." - Bill Gates, ODC 2008
SOURCE Convergence Communications

Convergence Communications, +1-314-686-4100, info@convergencecom.com