Dorset County Council works with partner councils and the community in Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole to make the best use of funds and deliver efficient and effective services. The Superfast Broadband team is currently working with Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) to make use of its framework for superfast broadband services and roll them out in Dorset. 

Dorset County Council Case Study

The Superfast Dorset team at Dorset County Council is currently managing one of the council’s flagship projects. Working with Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), the team is managing the roll out of superfast broadband across the region.

The UK Government aims to have the best superfast broadband networks in Europe by 2015 and has invested £530 million in the project, tasking Dorset with delivering this locally. One of the projects requirements was setting up a data portal to manage the project and communications with the national suppliers involved in its region.

When working with external organisations, security controls were essential

Dorset County Council required a tool that would enable it to share documents with both internal departments and external organisations, including security controls to dictate who could access and edit what content. As a public sector organisation, Dorset County Council also needed to comply with data protection laws and ensure that each document was stored in a secure location.

Pete Bartlett, Delivery Officer, Superfast Dorset, explains: “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.” 

An easy to use platform was key to meeting the challenging timescales

The Superfast Dorset team and suppliers have to share a huge number of large multimedia files such as maps, images, mapping information and tables, linking to the Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Pete and the team gave the DCC IT department a list of requirements for technology to support collaborative working with external organisations on the project. Huddle was the best available solution when linked to other internal software packages to meet the team’s requirements within the challenging timescales.

“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,” Pete continues.