The chain has 1,907 hotels across the United States, Canada and Mexico operating under its brands, which include DoubleTree Hotels & Resorts, Hampton Inn, Embassy Suites, Hilton Garden Inn, Red Lion Hotels & Inns, Harrison Conference Centers and Homewood Suites by Hilton. Of these, 1,532 are franchised, and the rest are owned and/or operated by Hilton.

Hilton was one of the first hotel companies to offer to its franchises electronic, rather than paper, versions of information on its design and construction standards. Hilton previously had used CD-ROMs. "As soon as we pressed a bunch of copies, it seemed as if the information had already changed," Keipper says, adding that Hilton is leading its industry in e-business tools for its franchises. "I don't think anyone in our industry is close to doing what we are doing," he says.

Adding or updating content is all Hilton needs to do for its hiltonfranchise.com site. Its ASP, Bricsnet -- which developed the software for automating the building design and construction process -- hosts and manages Hilton's Web servers in the ASP data center. The hotel company doesn't run any special software at its site, just an Internet connection to Bricsnet's data center.

Because the technology was built from scratch by Bricsnet, Hilton didn't experience any back-end or legacy application-integration problems. To ensure success, Hilton mostly needed to rethink its business processes and push the construction industry, which has been notoriously low tech, to change the way the sector does business, too. Even the more technology-savvy contractors, such as Hilton's architects, have had to adjust. It's easier to share CD-ROM drawings than to access and send them online, Hilton's Keipper says, but that hasn't deterred Hilton's architects. "Most already have high-speed access, so it hasn't been an issue for them with larger files," he says.

Bricsnet's BuildingCenter and related applications run on a combination of Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT servers at its data center, which supports Hilton as well as other clients, and can handle hundreds of users simultaneously. Bricsnet mirrors its site at an Exodus Communications data center.

The BuildingCenter applications are XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based for tying in with other sites and applications, such as enterprise-resource-planning and project-scheduling tools. Each of Hilton's franchises will be able to get a personalized view of the site, and since most contractors don't spend much time at their desks, BuildingCenter can send alerts via e-mail or to an e-mail-enabled pager.