First American Title Insurance Company
Underwriting Library®  

Originally published in 1993, First American marked its fourth year of using digital publishing technology when version 3.6 of the Underwriting Library was published in January 1998.

The Underwriting Library is the title insurance industry's first electronic publication of endorsements, policies, forms, state-specific guidelines on closing customs, documents used for conveyance and encumbrance, foreclosure procedures, closing costs, specific taxes required, endorsement and policy availability, notary requirements and other important information necessary to the real estate professional.

A reference tool which naturally streamlines internal communications, the Underwriting Library is a vast improvement on hard copy guidelines providing the title professional with powerful and critically important knowledge at fingertip-readiness to speed up activities such as negotiating multi-state, multi-million dollar underwriting transactions which require consideration of information from many sources. 

“It is very impressive to any party I am providing my title comments to whether it be opposing counsel or a title officer in my title negotiations as it conveys a higher level of professionalism and expertise.”
Roxanne Corley, Acquisition Compliance Supervisor, SunAmerica

The speed and efficiency of information access saves clients money.  This gives the user a competitive edge over other firms that don’t use the technology.

“Because the competition is so great from law firm to law firm, if you can deliver the information to the client more quickly with the least amount of billable time, you make the client very happy.”
Diana L. Portillo, Paralegal, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius

More than 7,500 employees, customers and competitors use the Underwriting Library across the nation.  It is available on CD-ROM and at First American's Web site (http://ul.firstam.com/).  The Underwriting Library received the “Best Commercial Infobase” award from Folio Corporation in 1994 and provides an excellent example of the ease and efficiency which comes with well-structured on-line information in a powerful search and retrieval format.

The Underwriting Library is completely searchable and hypertext-linked throughout.  EurekaDIGITAL worked with First American to develop automation processes to create over 28,000 hypertext links. The product replaces over 2,100 pages of text in the underwriting manuals, 935 forms, and 800 bulletins.

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Stewart Title Guaranty Company

Virtual Underwriter  

Stewart Title Guaranty Company, a major title insurance firm headquartered in Houston, Texas, wanted a simple, convenient, electronic compilation of underwriting guidelines, common business practices, forms and bulletins for title insurance and conveyancing.  The information was available on paper, but by making it available electronically, Stewart knew it could add quality and speed to the title insuring process. They brought this challenge to EurekaDIGITAL, and the product that resulted was the Virtual Underwriter.

The Virtual Underwriter  was designed to meet the needs of Stewart Title agents, associates and all of its customers.  More than 4,000 agents, attorneys and lenders use the Virtual Underwriter to increase productivity and streamline workflow, greatly reducing the number of phone calls to counsel.  

EurekaDIGITAL worked with Landata Systems (a subsidiary of Stewart Title Guaranty) to develop a format and create automation for processing over 100,000 hypertext links in the Virtual Underwriter.  The product replaces more than 1500 forms and 600 bulletins that would normally exist as paper.   The CD-ROM version replaces over 6,500 printed pages.

The Virtual Underwriter continues to evolve and push existing limits on productivity and can be accessed on the Internet at http://www.reprofile.com and http://www.stewart.com.  The Virtual Underwriter has won several industry specific awards such as the “Best Policies/Procedures Infobase” award from Folio Corporation (1995), Bronze Quill, and Title Tech Discovery award.

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Stewart Title Guaranty Company

REProfile.com

Stewart Title Guaranty Company, a major title insurance firm headquartered in Houston, Texas, wanted to create a multi-faceted industry portal to real estate information on the Internet.  This portal would include breaking news, property listings, legislation tracking, underwriting guidelines, mortgage calculations, and more. Stewart Title engaged EurekaDIGITAL to help them bring their ambitious plans to fruition, and together they created REProfile.com (www.reprofile.com).

Ginny Abiassi, Senior Vice President and Director of Communications for Stewart Title Guaranty Company, explained the motivation for launching REprofile.com: “Knowing how and when to take advantage of great business technology is what sets Stewart apart from our competitors. REprofile.com serves the real estate community and demonstrates our commitment to improving service through technology.”

However, REprofile.com is more than a simple gateway to information.  It has ‘personalization’ and ‘recommendation’ engines that enable the site to establish and maintain a relationship with individual visitors.

Mark Mathias, President of Eureka Electronic Publishing, oversaw the design and implementation of technology infrastructure for REprofile.com. “Stewart Title leveraged Eureka’s expertise with personalization and dynamic content management to make REprofile current and interactive.  Stewart Title’s REprofile.com is a next-generation Web site.  Translation:  Fresh information, served up several times daily, made to order at no charge.”

In August of 1999, REprofile.com received the coveted PURE GOLD award from the Real Estate Library.  The PURE GOLD award, the highest honor the Real Estate Library bestows, recognizes excellence in design and content critical to the interests of the real estate community.

Michael Schaffer of The Real Estate Library described the winning features of REprofile.com: “Not only is the breadth and depth of information at REprofile.com impressive; easy navigation and personalization make this site a ‘standout’ from contenders.”    

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LandAmerica

SingleSource

LandAmerica Financial Group, Inc., a leading provider of title insurance and real estate-related services, joined resources with Eureka Publishing's publishing expertise and Open Market's Folio™ software to help fulfill its mission to be the preeminent provider of diversified real estate-related services.  The product of this union is SINGLESOURCE, currently available on CD-ROM, which provides more training information than similar products in the industry, according to Cinda Polley, Special Projects Manager at LandAmerica National Headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.  SINGLESOURCE was designed from the ground up in robust Folio 4 technology, allowing LandAmerica to implement new features that make it easier for users to locate information.

SINGLESOURCE is an accessible repository of information from all areas of LandAmerica, including Commonwealth Land Title Insurance Company, Lawyers Title Insurance Corporation and Transnation Title Insurance Company.  The development of SINGLESOURCE was driven by a need to provide updated, centralized reference information and training materials to all direct operations, agents and customers of LandAmerica and its subsidiaries.  Polley points out that every individual will have access to current and consistent information.  "This translates to more timely delivery of products and services and reduced claims exposure resulting from a well-trained staff," she stated.

Mark Mathias, President of Eureka Publishing, commented, "Forward-looking companies like LandAmerica are realizing the benefits of maximizing the value of information assets, as with SINGLESOURCE, by making these assets more accessible, searchable and easier to update.  It directly impacts the bottom line by allowing people to do their jobs better and faster."

Polley worked closely with Eureka's staff to produce SINGLESOURCE and states, "Eureka has been an excellent partner.  They have contributed tremendously to the overall design and functionality of the product.  With their help, we will move SINGLESOURCE to our intranet and, ultimately, the Internet.  SINGLESOURCE is a tool that will continue to grow and improve with time."

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O'Melveny and Myers

EurekaDIGITAL provided the technology (Folio Views, siteDirector and LivePublish) to O'Melveny and Myers, one of the largest law firms in Los Angeles, which enabled their atorneys to quickly access critical and pertinent case information during litigation.  In addition, data from depositions, bibliographies, evidence, etc., is categorized and searchable based on the type of information it represents in relation to the case.  The information is portable and the delivery system is easy to use so that attorneys with varying degrees of technical literacy can easily access the information during trial on their laptops.

Long-time users of Concordance, a popular relational database for the Legal industry, OM&M's Litigation Support staff  implemented Folio Views as a full-text alternative to Concordance. Whether the tool is Folio or Concordance, attorneys use the data to formulate a strategy for an overall case. Dealing with potentially tens of thousands of pages of data, types of fields are set up to represent bad for us, good for us, this has to do with that part of the case, etc.  In addition, tagging is employed to create flags and hypertext links.  Similar to XML tagging, they apply multiple fields to a given record, thereby adding tremendous value to the information that is important at trial.  Structuring the information becomes essential to case strategy.  Folio Views software is also used in orders, pleadings, and all court documents.

In addition to supporting litigation, O'Melveny uses Folio technology for its Attorney Manual,  Policy/Procedure manuals and corporate phone directory.  Adobe Acrobat is used to electronically deliver internal forms.

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ULTRADATA

The ULTRADATA Encyclopedia

ULTRADATA (NASDAQ: ULTD) provides information management solutions for relationship-oriented financial institutions. The Company has in excess of 425 customers. The Company develops, markets and supports: ULTRAFIS* an advanced information management engine; the Financial Services Platform suite of information management modules; and the Ultra-Access* suite of remote banking products. Their software runs on a variety of UNIX platforms, and the PC-based modules run on Windows.

In the past at ULTRADATA, one department created external client documentation in FrameMaker while another created internal client documentation in Microsoft Word. External clients got their documents on CD-ROM or hard copy; internal clients got theirs hard copy; some updates were released electronically via email or diskette, some hard copy... in short, ULTRADATA had a need to consolidate, centralize and make more efficient and methodic the delivery of their documentation (some 20,000 pages for dozens of different products). ULTRADATA made the decision to create a corporate documentation encyclopedia that could be used by both internal and external clients, and to deliver this encyclopedia on a CD-ROM and over the internet/intranet. They decided to convert all their documentation to FrameMaker, then to PDF, and have them accessed via Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Eureka Electronic Publishing consulted with ULTRADATA and helped them save time and money by automating some of the processing for the ULTRADATA Encyclopedia, a single repository that contains all of the documentation for their software. ULTRADATA was converting their Word documents to FrameMaker, using Frame templates to provide a consistent format, and then creating Acrobat PDF files from the Frame files. They wanted a semi-standardized set of Acrobat Bookmark buttons to be added to all of these Frame documents as they were processed into Acrobat docs. Eureka Publishing automated the export of all of the Frame directories to PostScript files, the insertion of the appropriate series of PDFMark commands into each PostScript file, and the Distillation of those files, thus creating the final PDF documents with their desired Bookmarks.

The end result was was to bring all of ULTRADATA's information for all their products into a single source—but they went even farther in showing the value of re-using an information asset. ULTRADATA uses RoboHelp for its online help documents. Using links within RoboHelp, users can now click an icon and bring up the ULTRADATA Encyclopedia. Their reference manuals now supplement their online help—and ULTRADATA didn't have to re-engineer their ULTRADATA Encyclopedia to use it again.

Lastly, ULTRADATA will be making individual PDF files available for download from their Web site. If a customer loads the ULTRADATA Encyclopedia on a server (as opposed to running it on the CD-ROM), updated PDF files can be downloaded to the user's computer system on a regular basis to update the ULTRADATA Encyclopedia without having to re-install the entire CD-ROM. This also means that ULTRADATA does not have to send out CD-ROMs very often (ULTRADATA’s goal is to send out CD-ROMs twice per year) AND updates can be made available to customers quickly and inexpensively.

ULTRADATA is now reaping the business benefits of publishing electronically—money saved, time not wasted looking for information, and updates handled efficiently.

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Sanwa Bank
Policies & Procedures Manuals

Sanwa Bank's California Service Center in Monterey Park, California maintains an extensive set of Policies and Procedures manuals that document a wide variety of bank operations. The manuals have been maintained and updated for the past several years using Corel's WordPerfect word processing software and distributed throughout the bank's branches in the form of paper inserts to existing hard copy manuals, and Sanwa wanted to begin offering the manuals' contents online.

EurekaDIGITAL analyzed Sanwa's needs and recommended converting Sanwa's manuals into Adobe's FrameMaker software, which is better suited to managing large collections of technical documentation. FrameMaker supports the creation and management of books, and allows Sanwa staff to make formatting changes that affect hundreds of files by simply making the changes in a Master Template and then updating the books with the Master Template's formats. This feature alone promised to save Sanwa a great deal of time.

FrameMaker also includes native support for the creation of Portable Document Format (PDF) files, which are readable by anyone on any computer platform, using the Acrobat Reader software freely available for download from Adobe's website (www.adobe.com). 

EurekaDIGITAL created custom FrameMaker templates that matched the look and feel of the existing Sanwa documents, and then imported the thousands of WordPerfect files that make up the manuals into the FrameMaker templates. Next EurekaDIGITAL assembled the files comprising each manual into separate FrameMaker books. Once the books were completed, each book was saved to a server on Sanwa's local area network (LAN) as a PDF file, available for viewing by anyone on the network. As weekly updates to the books are made, Sanwa staff simply re-saves the updated books to the server as PDF files, providing up-to-date policies and procedures information online with a minimum of effort. 

"Sanwa Bank California's Policy and Procedures Unit  is very pleased with FrameMaker," said Sue Carlin, who supervises the unit. "It is very user-friendly and even new staff members pick it up quickly."

Future plans call for the deployment of a corporate intranet, facilitating manual viewing through any browser using the free Acrobat plug-in, which opens Acrobat directly within the browser window.

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2Trees
CD-ROM Creation

Provided all of the technical services necessary to take their data and create a commercially marketable CD-ROM. This included interface design, data management and manipulation, hypertext linking, installation services and creation of a master CD-ROM.

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Waste Management
Website Development

Successfully took over development of www.wm.com, the Web site for the largest waste disposal company in the world. In a matter of a few months, EurekaDIGITAL updated the site to handle features that the customer had been wanting for a long time and then proceeded to enhance the site with features that allowed visitors to the site to navigate more easily, provide information faster, and even enable Waste Management's 1,500 local sites to create their own Web sites without requiring any custom programming.

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POA Publishing
Manual Conversion / XML Tagging Setup

For a medium-size publisher who wanted to offer currently existing paper-based content in an online format, EurekaDIGITAL recommended converting PageMaker files to FrameMaker+SGML files, which could then be exported to XML format and used online in a variety of settings. EurekaDIGITAL created an Element Definition Document (EDD) that defined the structure that the XML export would use, and the client converted each Pagemaker file to FrameMaker and then went through each FrameMaker file and tagged the content appropriately to match the EDD. The XML export will be used in NextPage's LivePublish software, for display on the Web or CD-ROM.

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