Dorset County Council selects Huddle to speed up broadband delivery plans
Data sharing platform was best fit because of time-scale and security reasons, says council
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.
Dorset County Council selects Huddle to speed up broadband delivery plans
Data sharing platform was best fit because of time-scale and security reasons, says council
A key reason for opting for Huddle, Bartlett said, was the limited time frame it had to get the data portal up and running.
"It was quite tight for our IT department on the BDUK framework, so I took the clients view of giving our requirements to our internal IT departments and a number of different options were considered but the best solution was Huddle in terms of the security compliance as well as the audit trail side of things," he said.
"On the security side we had to comply with data protection laws and ensure that each document was stored in a secure location, so we had to be compliant with the business impact levels (BIL) of IL3 for commercially sensitive information and IL2 for other data. This factored into us using Huddle because it was all included in one package," he added.
At the end of October 2012, the council raised an order to purchase Huddle licences, and on 6 November, it held a webinar to train staff on how to use the platform.
"We had a webinar with our account manager on how to use Huddle, which was tailored to our needs. Personally, even if we hadn't had that training we would still have been able to easily work out how to use it and what controls were located where. It's intuitive and easy to use and everyone, including the external organisations, could get up and running straightaway, saving us valuable time," Bartlett said.
The council is currently inviting tenders from suppliers for the framework as a whole, and the Huddle space is being used as a data repository for tender responses.
"Once we get into the delivery phase it will be used as a two-way data sharing platform for the suppliers to evidence what work they've done with us through their mapping and invoicing, for example," Bartlett added.
Bartlett claimed that another benefit of using Huddle is that the council can now access files from the Local Authority Resource Centre (LARC), a workspace in which BDUK publicises all of its latest documents that also uses the Huddle platform.