Personal Electronic Notebook with Sharing

The concept of an electronic or digital engineering design notebook used by designers to capture information for re-use and sharing is becoming reality in many different flavors. Our development of PENS (Personal Electronic Notebook with Sharing) responds to observed designers' needs for a lightweight tool that is facile enough to compete with paper notebooks in functionality. As design information is entered into PENS in real-time, the PENS information web grows. As it grows, selections can be incrementally published for sharing with collaborators over the Internet's World-Wide Web. In an era where both network security concerns and distributed collaboration demands are growing together, PENS has the capability for firewall-independent sharing. To evaluate the utility of the PENS notebook concept, a prototype has been developed and used by 14 mechanical engineering design teams that span local and remote design partnerships.