BIW Technologies (BIW), developer of the UK construction industry’s leading collaboration platform, has signed a two-year $0.5 million (£275,000) 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, Inc. “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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Notes to editors:

About BIW:

• Project collaboration services from BIW Technologies (www.biwtech.com) were first employed in 1999 on UK construction projects for Sainsbury’s. BIW believes it is the European leader in web-based collaboration systems for the construction and property industry, measured by numbers of users, usage and volume of data.
• BIW Information Channel is a sophisticated web-based supply chain integration technology, designed specifically for construction projects or programmes. Each client is provided with a unique, project or programme-specific website created around a knowledge database. With this, data can be made available securely to every team member – from the earliest concepts, through detailed design, buildability studies, pre-fabrication, construction, maintenance, operation and improvement to the eventual demolition or dismantling of the facility.
• At 31 July 2004, the total number of BIW Information Channel users had reached 35,478, from 3868 different companies. Collectively, these users had logged in five million times, to work on around 2000 projects with a total capital value estimated at around £15 billion.
• BIW customers include United Utilities, Sainsbury’s, BAA, housebuilders Crest Nicholson and the Peabody Trust, Marks & Spencer, the Ministry of Defence, the Wellcome Trust, O2, Mace, Bovis Lend Lease, Kajima, Gleeds and developers Land Securities and Garbe.
• BIW’s figures are based purely on drawings or documents submitted to its system, not on the number of people on a distribution list. Once an item is published it is immediately available to other team members for viewing and comment.
• BIW and BIW Information Channel are registered trademarks or trademarks of BIW Technologies Ltd.

About eReview:

• eReview (www.ereviewonline.com) is real-time and asynchronous, web-based document-centric, view, markup and collaboration software for design teams. eReview offers a one-to-many model of collaboration, moving one step ahead of the traditional peer-to-peer model. The software requires only one server-based installation, saving clients having to install anything further on their machines. eReview is also platform agnostic in the sense that it can seamlessly run on multiple platforms such as Windows, MAC, UNIX simultaneously.
• Furthermore, eReview has the capability to read native file formats without the need for original applications on either the client or server machines. Incorporating powerful features like 3D model viewing, and compatibility with over 450 2D file formats and MS-Office documents, eReview offers state-of-the-art desktop application sharing and Web-based collaboration via textual chat, voice and video conferencing.