Project „AuWiPot“ – Wind Resources in Austria and Their Energy Potential Background

The acronym "AuWiPot" stands for a project that the Climate and Energy Fund initiated in cooperation with the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The goal is to create a high-resolution wind resource map that covers all of Austria and that provides information about the wind energy potential that can be realized in Austria as well as precise modeling of local wind conditions. Technical aspects, regional planning, and cost effectiveness are all taken into consideration.

The calculated wind resources – in conjunction with the estimates of potential energy – will be made available to the public on the Internet as a "wind atlas." The wind energy potential that can be realized will be presented at the district level, and the user can vary the technical and economic factors such as system size and electricity price. This will allow economic as well as ecological forecasts to be simulated at the regional level too, and decisions can be made based on these forecasts. This meets the growing need for alternative forms of energy which are also economically feasible.

Project Management

To meet the complex requirements of a project of this size, the responsible planning office, Energiewerkstatt, decided to use ProjectNetWorld®: this web-based project management software offers an easy-to-use, standardized user interface, which allows for uniform and thus efficient communication processes and relatively uncomplicated information and document management.

Management of project-related information and documents (including automatic revision) on a central platform is critical; it allows data and content from various departments to be combined and presented in a clear manner. In addition to ease of use, ProjectNetWorld® guarantees maximum cost transparency– a critical factor for funded projects such as these: the software is not purchased as a license, but rather is merely rented for the duration of use and according to the number of project employees or users.

Summary
Scientific projects increasingly rely on modern project management tools to process and organize information and work activities from various departments as part of transparent workflows.

An open, freely scalable, and cost-transparent system like ProjectNetWorld® creates the ideal conditions for efficient project work – especially in interdisciplinary research fields.

SaaS: From Software to Service

Today's modern economy requires not only flexible employees but also flexible tools. Those who travel often especially understand the need to be able to work with their usual software at any time or place. And this is exactly what SaaS tools make possible.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is a model that makes software packages accessible over the Internet through a standard web browser. Installation, maintenance, and program upgrades are unnecessary. This guarantees maximum mobility: only an Internet connection is required to access the familiar work environment.

SaaS is generally rented – the cost depends on the number of users and the duration of use. This makes SaaS solutions more flexible and also makes clear the particular costs involved. Furthermore, SaaS solutions can usually be tried for free.

Despite its obvious advantages, SaaS still has to fight prejudices and concerns. This is related, above all, to the fear of dependence and security aspects. Many companies do not want to let go of their documents and data for security reasons, or they want to keep applications such as virus protection programs "in house." These standards should not be undermined because of temporary project work.

But increasingly complex requirements for IT security are actually a decisive advantage of SaaS solutions. External software service providers can often provide a level of security that individual user companies could not come close to matching. Providers of SaaS solutions today maintain data centers that are subject to the strictest security guidelines. And sensitive data is often better stored in certified data centers than on a company's own server.

Modern Project Management Occurs on the Internet

Web-based access to data offers many advantages over the traditional client-server architecture particularly in project management, where project employees are working in different locations and at different times. Concerns about security are mostly unfounded. Software such as ProjectNetWorld® meets the highest security standards. Read and write authorizations as part of a sophisticated role management system are as integral as encrypted data transfer. Furthermore, SaaS solutions are generally scalable and modular – they of course have all the necessary features and tools for a particular area of application, but they offer the option of using only what is actually needed.

Tool Tip: ProjectNetWorld® - Interactive Scheduling

The schedule is the core of all modern project management software – it provides planning efficiency, helps project participants meet deadlines, supports project control and monitoring, and helps deploy project employees properly. ProjectNetWorld® supports the individual steps required for creating a schedule with this powerful tool:

• developing a work breakdown structure – defining work packages, activities
• defining dependencies between the work packages and activities
• implementing the work breakdown structure with a cost estimate for each work package and activity

The schedule is generated in this way in conjunction with the available resources.

The schedule is interactive: it can be centrally created and maintained. Tasks are clearly presented to each project participant in MyWorld, the personal work area of each project participant. Each confirmation by the project employee is assigned to the particular task, giving the project manager a current picture of the progress of individual tasks at any point in time.

Resource planning is also a particularly effective instrument. It allows individual tasks or project activities to be assigned to project employees. This generates a work calendar that makes the team and resource utilization transparent. The ProjectNetWorld® technical wizard supports the assignment of resources and provides warnings when resources are overloaded.

The ProjectNetWorld® scheduling feature is equipped with numerous functions that make it easy to create and maintain a schedule:

• definition of work packages, activities, and milestones
• automatic display of delays
• management of all time-related data as part of the projects
• role- and person-based information control
• and much more

A Look at the Coming Release

The ProjectNetWorld® scheduling feature will be expanded in the next software release, which will be available this fall. With this new version, MS Project schedules can be imported into and exported from ProjectNetWorld. This means that existing MS Project schedules can be easily transferred into ProjectNetWorld®, and existing work can be continued uninterrupted.

An important new feature is the "ToDo" module. With this tool, tasks (or "ToDos") can be created for each activity. These can be assigned to project participants and monitored. These "ToDos" can also be used independently of the schedule in order to also support small projects with their structured work – "scheduling light," so to speak. Here too, each project participant to whom a "ToDo" has been assigned receives all the relevant information in his personal work area.