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January 2002

Business Collaborator chosen by leading UK development consultancy Halcrow to manage major projects

Business Collaborator has been selected by Halcrow for their corporate Project Extranet solution. Immediate benefits include the ability for project teams to access and collaborate on key project information (documents, drawings, e-mails) from anywhere in the world. By standardising on a corporate solution, Halcrow expects to have access to an expanding project archive, providing an invaluable source of knowledge to aid any future work.

Specialising in the transport, water and property sectors, Halcrow is an independent provider of infrastructure-based business solutions. With 27 offices in the UK and a further 30 across the world, the company offers professional consultancy resources for the planning, design and supervision of major projects on a global basis.

The decision to purchase specialist knowledge management software was taken in 2000. The Halcrow IT infrastructure is standardised on the Microsoft platform and a number of solutions were initially considered, including both Business Collaborator and a competing solution from Microsoft. Following a period of detailed evaluation and extensive trials, Doug Bevan, Halcrow's Technical Director for Work Systems & CAD, decided that Business Collaborator most closely met their requirement for a complete solution which could be up and running without the need for extensive customisation.

Commenting on the final decision, Doug Bevan said:

“We have invested a great deal of time in finding the right solution. Business Collaborator offers us all the functionality we need immediately with the option of tailoring the software at a future date to create a Halcrow corporate ethos for external users. In addition, we were impressed with the level of support available, including comprehensive training programmes, technical advice and customisation ”

Sanjeev Shah, Group Manager for Business Collaborator, commented:

“We believe in working closely with clients to provide a complete solution which matches their business processes. We are delighted that Colin (Mitchell, Halcrow Group Director of MIS) chose Business Collaborator after nearly a year of detailed investigation. We are looking forward to the coming year and to helping Halcrow realise their knowledge management vision. ”