The Bottom Line
		This article will put you In Touch with: · How online access to technical reference materials improves collaboration, productivity and the bottom line. · How ITKnowledge Enterprise's search engine pinpoints the information you need from today's authoritative, trusted publishers. · Why EarthWeb designed ITKnowledge Enterprise as a resource for both technical and non-technical users.

"It's common for our people to be working with a colleague and need to get up to speed quickly on a new technology, application or programming language they've yet to encounter," Ushijima explains. "My team needs to understand the lingo—acronyms, capabilities, concepts—otherwise collaboration gets bogged down."

To ensure his group keeps pace with the company's tremendous IT demands and developing technologies, Ushijima realized he needed to provide the team access to technical reference materials.

Ushijima selected EarthWeb's ITKnowledge Enterprise^SM—the world's largest online IT reference center with 2,240 books from 21 leading publishers (and counting)—to help his IT professionals stay productive and "in the know."

		Why You Need ITKnowledge:
		· Keep your business on top of the ever-changing IT arena. · Put the most extensive online library of IT books at your fingertips—2,240 titles from 21 leading technical publishers. · Use it for training, education, fast answers, research, product evaluation, decision support, and skill development. · Search hundreds of thousands of pages in seconds. · Help your people do their jobs faster and better. · Not only for IT professionals—for anyone who uses a computer.

Find it fast
With ITKnowledge Enterprise users never have to scour through books on a shelf or conduct time-consuming and often unyielding Web searches for technical information again. ITKnowledge Enterprise's powerful and flexible search engine helps users quickly and easily pinpoint just the information they need from authoritative, trusted industry resources: Macmillan Computer Publishing, IDG Books Worldwide, The Coriolis Group, CRC Press, McGraw-Hill and Wiley Computer Publisher. The site also provides users with access to guides and source code.

"People generally don't read IT books from cover-to-cover," says Ann Feng Simon, product manager for ITKnowledge. "They read snippets to find answers to specific questions or to understand a particular topic. Our search engine is tailor-made to suit this need."

ITKnowledge Enterprise's extensive capabilities include searches by keywords, author, title, ISBN, publisher and publication date. Users may also drill down further by narrowing the search to a particular category—from ITKnowledge Enterprise's more than 20 pre-defined categories—or even search within a specific book.

For Pactiv IT professionals, the real-time access to this comprehensive technical library has proven to be an invaluable tool. The IT group recently encountered some networking problems and ITKnowledge Enterprise played a key role in resolving the issues and minimizing downtime.

"Our applications development group needed to collaborate with our WAN people to solve the problem," Ushijima recalls. "ITKnowledge Enterprise's search feature alone won them over. They also told me how helpful it was for everyone to be able to access the same information online to overcome any challenges."

In addition, Pactiv further leverages ITKnowledge Enterprise as a training tool to deepen people's expertise and extend their abilities into new areas on an ongoing basis.

For techies and non-techies alike
While Pactiv uses ITKnowledge Enterprise as a highly technical resource for its IT professionals, EarthWeb's Ann Simon says it's designed to help anyone who uses a computer.

		Topics for Every IT Need:
		· Certification and Training · Database and ERP · Hardware and Operating Systems · Networking and Telecommunications · Web and Software Development · Desktop Applications · Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design · Business and IT Management · General Internet · Software Engineering · Artificial Intelligence

"Of course it's loaded with technical information for the high-level developer learning XML or the Perl programmer who needs a string of code," Simon explains. "But it's also extremely helpful for the new project manager who needs some pointers or the administrative assistant learning Microsoft Word."

To address these average computer users, the ITKnowledge Desktop library was created with the Enterprise product. The Desktop library is comprised of a selection of Desktop Application titles for topics such as spreadsheets, word processing and presentation software, enabling the average computer user to find the information they need.

The key, she says, is giving people the tools they need to do their job and keeping IT professionals in step with the fast-moving, ever-changing IT industry. To that end, ITKnowledge Enterprise is constantly adding more books to its repository.

It currently holds licenses for 5,000 books, more than double the current online total. Five of the service's 21 publishing partners are exclusive, making their content available to ITKnowledge users only. Once users find the information they need and assess the content of the book online, they may purchase the title online from the Digital Guru/ITKnowledge Technical Bookstore—a co-branded site hosted by DigitalGuru.com. Links are available to the bookstore from the ITKnowledge site.

Economical, too
Along with increasing productivity levels, ITKnowledge Enterprise's reasonable annual subscription fee also positively impacts an organization's bottom line, making it an extremely cost-effective solution.

"There's no way we could afford to build and maintain a hard-copy library of this magnitude on such a broad range of subjects at Pactiv," Ushijima concludes. "ITKnowledge Enterprise is a very good product at a good price. I recommend it to my colleagues at other companies."

Ready to see more? Software Spectrum and ITKnowledge are offering Software Spectrum customers a 30-day free trial subscription to ITKnowledge Enterprise. Sign up today.