BIW Invest £275k In Viewing Technology Development

Anglo-American partnership with Web4 to deliver new collaborative functionality to users of BIW Information Channel.

BIW Technologies (BIW), developer of the UK construction industry's leading collaboration platform, has signed a two-year $0.5 million (£275k) agreement with Web4, a division of California-based netGuru Inc, to use Web4's resources and expertise to enhance its own viewing technology.

BIW Information Channel platform is Europe's most intensively used web-based construction project management system.

Since 2000, BIW has invested heavily in creating its own powerful viewer - or visual collaboration environment - and carefully integrated this with its core platform.

To help increase its lead over its competitors, BIW now aims to extend the capabilities delivered through this viewer interface.

In a development partnership with Web4, BIW plans to enhance its viewer's asynchronous and real-time collaboration facilities.

Drawing on Web4's expertise in developing its eReview application, future releases of BIW's visual interface will support a wider range of file formats, deliver new online meeting, chat and messaging features, and incorporate advanced voice and video technologies.

End-users will be able to collaborate in real-time, using co-view, co-markup, white-boarding and conferencing features; such 'net meetings' will also be capable of being saved, replayed and archived into BIW Information Channel's core work environment.

"Visual, knowledge-centric collaboration, both asynchronous and real-time, will soon become an important differentiator in any sophisticated web-based supply chain technology," says Colin Smith, BIW's chief executive.

"This deal makes NetGuru's leading-edge technologies and its substantial intellectual resources and manpower available to BIW, massively increasing our development capabilities.

We are particularly excited about the integrated solution that we are putting together specifically for construction projects or programmes.

The combined offering will consolidate BIW's leadership position in the UK and Europe".

"BIW is clearly the European leader in web-based collaboration systems for the construction and property industry, measured by many metrics such as numbers of users, usage and volume of data," commented Amrit Das, CEO of netGuru.

"We are very excited to work with them to incorporate collaborative features from our sophisticated eReview product into the BIW solution delivered to their long list of esteemed customers." The planned integration will allow BIW users to view, find, examine, manipulate, and mark-up diverse documents including 3D models and more than 450 types of 2D drawing and other file formats, as well as conference/collaborate with others.

eReview allows multiple participants across the globe to simultaneously view and redline documents with their geographically dispersed team members using their web browser.

The same environment allows for chat, whiteboard, audio-video conferencing, remote desktop and application sharing, web-casting and many other facilities to comprise a complete document-centric conferencing system.

Asynchronous and real-time collaboration enable users to respond to constantly changing needs quickly and effectively.

It also helps users collaborate on unstructured data, documents, capture the tacit knowledge and create a corporate record of meetings that is searchable and re-playable.

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