Stefan Persson is a Business Information Management strategist at Tyréns who uses Webforum to manage documentation on behalf of their clients. Stefan has also worked with Tyréns own system within the same area – that system is now being replaced with Webforum.

What was it that made you take the decision to work with Webforum?

– Ongoing development of a tool with as much capability as Webforum requires a lot of work. We realized that it was better that we focus on the management of information and not tool development – especially when there is a tool such as Webforum that has the required features and is very affordable.

How many customers do you have and who are they?

– Tyréns is implementing thousands of projects per year. The customer may be a municipality, the department of transport or an industrial company. Moreover, we have several projects where we help customers to manage all of the documentation for their property portfolios. Since the cooperation with Webforum started in 2012, we have started a number of projects where Webforum is used as the project portal. The idea is that Webforum should function as our standard solution in the case where the customer does not already have a system in place or where the existing system does not have the right functionality or is not accessible to all the project participants.

What is the value to the customer?

– In summary, I can say that it is the simplicity of getting started with the possibility to grow and then use the more advanced features as needed. If, as in some cases, we have tens of thousands of documents in a project and it must be easy to both find and manage all the information. At Tyréns, we may, in addition to being active in the project itself, also help the client to set up a good structure for their information so that the project runs smoothly. In this case, there is no need for a separate project just to structure all the project information so it fits the maintenance requirements.

What are the system features that you need?

– For us it is of course important that it is easy to use and has all the standard features, such as versioning, auditing, validation and metadata management. It is also important that there is a web service that does not require installation and a lot of hardware. With Webforum we can often get started on a new project based on our templates in a few hours.

Beyond these basic requirements, we had about fifty more specific requirements. An example of such a feature is the ability to build navigation trees based on the metadata so that, for example, an operations technician does not have to click back and forth in many different folders in order to find his documents. Another example is the ability to store both a drawing and the corresponding PDF-file together. One feature that was not a requirement from our side which we really like is the ability to personalise a portal with colour and format to suit a specific customer or a specific project.

What would you also consider important for choosing such a system?

– The world does not stand still. The demands we have on a system today will not be the same as we have 2-3 years from now. Consequently, it is very helpful to us to have a good dialogue to jointly discuss what features to develop. This dialogue works very well with Webforum.