Another new ‘Content Hero’ among my list of buildings professionals using social media to share their industry insight is Zach Denning, currently a Sales Engineer work in the Building Automation Division of Western Allied Mechanical. Per his Linkedin profile, Zach has recognized a gap between mechanical engineering firms that design sophisticated energy-efficient systems and automation companies that are tasked with  implementing the desired mechanical sequence as a digital program for building control systems. One could write a book on the subject, and Zach appears to be in the process of getting that done. Just like Dickens and Dostoyevsky, he is doing his writing in installments using Scribd.com as his document-sharing website. He’s worked for a number of different automation contractors in this career, each typically associated with a particular big building equipment brand. In this series of articles, the emphasis is on the Tridium Niagara platform — the most ‘open system’ control integration platform.

He’s made 13 articles available on Scribd.com. Scribd makes publishing to a mass audience simple and almost free, plus the content is rendered for easy reading on any device. Denning has promoted each installment with a posts to the Association of Energy Engineers, automatedbuildings.com, and other discussion groups on Linkedin. I appreciated that Zach offers a historical summary of the integrated building controls industry over the last 20 years here. The industry is undergoing a generational shift and there’s convergence with the IT industry underway. As a result, there are many building automation novices that can use this background.  Automatedbuildings editor Ken Sinclair has included the latest of Zach’s articles in the October edition of his monthly online magazine, and the comments back to Zach on the Linkedin Discussion Group are numerous and detailed. So he’s been successful at getting a good conversation going.