Dorset County Council has selected enterprise content collaboration platform Huddle as a data sharing platform to help to manage its broadband delivery plans.
Tech City’s Huddle secures third round of funding Huddle secures vast majority of GBP 453,778 spent on G-Cloud Broadband in 2013: Four-letter words beginning with 'F'
The council has put together a team, dubbed ‘the Superfast Dorset team' to work alongside Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) with an aim to deliver broadband to its users locally as part of the government's aim to have the ‘best superfast broadband' network in Europe by 2015.
One of the projects' requirements identified in August 2012, was to set up a data portal to manage the project and communications with the national suppliers involved within the council's region.
The council required a tool that would enable it to share documents with both internal departments and external organisations.
Pete Bartlett, delivery officer at Superfast Dorset, explained that his team and suppliers have to share a huge number of large multimedia files such as maps, images, and tables which link to the Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and that this was a key reason in looking for a change.
"We have internal systems for sharing data, but we mostly rely on email. However, with the superfast broadband project, we're looking at files of up to 100MB and as our email attachments are limited to just 10MB, we needed a much better solution," he stated.
The Superfast Dorset team looked into several solutions, before deciding that Huddle was the best fit.
"We chose to use Huddle in October 2012 following an evaluation of several file sharing options consisting of a selection from market leaders, in-house solutions [such as creating an internal server for use on a FTP basis), and other file sharing products already in use at the council," the council's ICT business analyst, Alison Andrews told Computing.
"We evaluated each of the tools against their ability to satisfy our short term requirements for file sharing. Our requirements were a mix of technical issues around maintenance and security, and user requirements such as functionality and ease of use. The outcome of the evaluation was a recommendation to our ICT steering group who approved the procurement," she added.
