Santee Cooper is now offering their customers near real time outage information with iFactor Consulting’s Storm Center product. 
Storm Center, an interactive outage map available on Santee Cooper’s website (http://stormcenter.santeecooper.com) and also accessible on smartphones, displays both individual outages and outage summary information by county. The map provides users with critical details for outages, including number of customers affected and estimated restoration time. Santee Cooper customers can also use the site to report outages and check outage status. With Storm Center, customers, the media, emergency responders, and public officials have quick and easy access to vital outage information 24 hours a day.
“During storms and other outage times, we understand customers want to know Santee Cooper is not only aware of the outage, but that 
we are actively working to safely restore power,” said Mike Poston, vice president of retail operations. “This tool helps put the critical info they need right at their fingertips.”
Santee Cooper is South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility, and the state’s largest power producer. The ultimate source of electricity for 2 million South Carolinians, Santee Cooper is dedicated to being the state’s leading resource for improving the quality of life for the people of South Carolina. For more information, visit www.santeecooper.com.
Minnesota Power recently implemented the outage communications module of iFactor’s mobile device applications, a suite of reusable software modules that allows utilities to quickly deliver self 
service solutions to their customers. The free smartphone app is available on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, and is available in the app store for each specific device. Minnesota Power is among a small number of utilities in the nation to offer near real-time outage information in a free smartphone app.
With this new app, customers will have access to the same outage information provided on the Minnesota Power online outage map, Storm Center, which is also powered by iFactor. Outage data is displayed using an interactive Storm Center map, and summary information by county is available in a chart format. Data from the Storm Center site is delivered directly to the app from the utilities’ outage management system, including estimated restoration times once the outage is assessed by field crews. 
Minnesota Power, an operating division of ALLETE (NYSE: ALE), serving customers since 1906, generates, transmits and distributes electricity in a 26,000-square-mile region of Northern Minnesota. The company provides retail electric to 146,000 customers, including some of the largest industrial customers in the country and provides wholesale electric service to 16 municipalities. More information can be found at: www.mnpower.com.
Petroleum Authority of Thailand (PTT) has joined the growing list of utilities enjoying the benefits of Web Maps Connector (WMC). PTT recently purchased WMC to enable access to LongDo Maps from their Smallworld Gas Transmission Office application. Once the WMC implementation is complete, PTT users will be able to view raster imagery and also utilize Point of Interest (POI) search and Driving Directions. iFactor is also developing customizations to PTT’s Smallworld Internet Application Server (SIAS) to expose the POI search and Driving Directions to their web client users. WMC is typically used to access map data from sources such as Bing Maps, Open Street Map, Google Maps, and Digital Map Products. This particular implementation illustrates the versatility of WMC in accessing additional data sources and also providing specific solutions based on customer needs.
About Petroleum Authority of Thailand
PTT is Thailand’s biggest petroleum company. PTT and PTT Group engage in fully integrated natural gas business covering the full spectrum of natural gas businesses i.e. exploration and production from both domestic and oversea sources, transportation of natural gas via pipeline system, gas separation as well as marketing of natural gas. By operating pipeline system both onshore and offshore, PTT fulfills its mission in strengthening energy security for the nation. PTT maximizes value of natural gas through its five units of gas separation plants which extract raw material and gas products for petrochemical plants.
Santee Cooper, the state utility of coastal South Carolina, has contracted with iFactor Consulting to provide an upgrade of their existing PowerOn OMS and the incorporation of several iFactor supporting software products.
The project started this winter with the development and integration of iFactor Storm Center and iFactor’s call taking application for PowerOn. Storm Center
is a world-class web-based product designed to provide the public with up to date outage information and reporting tools. Through this portal, the public will be able to view accurate outage information with the appropriate details for public consumption. Customers will also be able to report outages and view restoration information.
Included in the first phase of the project is the incorporation of the web-based call taking application for PowerOn. The call taking application integrates directly into the PowerOn OMS Oracle schema to enable customer service representatives the ability to search for customer accounts, view call and outage history, log new calls and manage callbacks. PowerOn call taking and Storm Center were rolled out for internal usage during July. Storm Center will be introduced to the public in September.
This summer iFactor will commence with the PowerOn upgrade which will conclude at the end of the year.
We are really excited to announce the availability of Storm Center 3, the biggest product upgrade to date. SC3 is packed with changes to enhance the user experience and allow you to deliver more information to customers on a variety of devices. We started with an upgrade to Microsoft Bing Maps version 7, which offers new map tiles, improved map controls, and support for iPhone and Android web browsers. 
We carried the mobile support form Bing through to all of the libraries and features in Storm Center so that the new version is fully supported with the web browsers on iPhones, iPads, and all Android devices. This support goes beyond just “making it work”- Storm Center 3 includes pages and content which automatically optimize for the mobile device with support for dragging and pinching the map to zoom and pan, and touching the icons to see the current information about an outage.
We have also integrated location-based APIs so that Storm Center on a mobile device can automatically zoom to your current location!
In addition to mobile support and the move to Bing Maps 7, we enhanced data flows and formats throughout Storm Center to streamline and minimize the content for use on mobile networks. The combination of these changes will give Storm Center users a great boost in page rendering times, performance, and scalability, with initial tests showing up to a 70% reduction in the data requirements for the application.
We have also integrated a variety of architectural changes and features into the product as fully supported modules. We have enhanced the clustering functionality in SC 3 with support for thematic clusters, which allows us to use different sizes, colors, and labels to distinguish each outage cluster. Our cloud hosting option is now fully integrated with the product, and can be implemented during your upgrade with a simple addition to your annual maintenance fee. 
Likewise, the SC 3 architecture now has full support for enabling optional modules such as animated WeatherBug lightning and radar, Event History tracking, and complete layer management support.
In addition to the outage map and outage summaries, we have also updated the outage reporting framework in Storm Center 3 with full mobile support. This framework allows us to quickly implement web based outage reporting for your customers, with support for access to the forms using both desktop and mobile browsers. With some utilities seeing upwards of 10% of outage reports coming via the web, it is critical to consider enabling this channel to help meet customer expectations and save costs. Thanks to Storm Center 3, you can deliver a combination of high level summaries, informative maps, and account specific reporting and information all to the desktop and mobile web!
For our existing Storm Center customers, an upgrade to version 3 requires that we work with your team to implement the new product on both the application/web services side as well as implementing your web page templates with it. We also need to work with you to implement your content and look and feel on the mobile pages, which are essentially a brand new page template to consider. We can deploy the mobile functionality as a link from your existing mobile website, or can work with you to launch a mobile website using Storm Center outage maps, summaries, and reporting as your initial content. Overall, this upgrade is a very straightforward process which can be completed quickly.
