Dorset County Council selects Huddle to speed up broadband delivery plans

Dorset County Council has adopted enterprise content collaboration platform Huddle to help it to manage its broadband delivery plans.

The council has put together a team, dubbed "the Superfast Dorset team", to work alongside Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) on delivering fast broadband to households and businesses in the county.

In August 2012, the team realised it needed a data portal to help it to manage the project and communicate with suppliers.

Superfast Dorset delivery officer Pete Bartlett explained that his team and suppliers have to share a huge number of large multimedia files such as maps, images, and tables that link to the Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

"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 said.

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 FTP server], 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.