Newsletter June 1999
The CDM ToolKit™ 2000 product is widely installed throughout the customer base. This newsletter brings you information on the upgrade process and the options available to you in the next few months.
CIRIA Seminar
The third in our current series of CIRIA seminars was held in London at the Royal Academy of Engineers on 21 May 99. This well attended event included a presentation by Martin Thurgood, Her Majesty’s Principal Inspector responsible for Construction.
Martin spoke of the Health & Safety problems in construction and how the CDM regulations demanded a radical change in the culture of the construction industry. His solution included the CDM ToolKit™ as a vehicle to open up the flow of information across the whole construction arena plus the elimination of risk through good design. He saw the need for an integrated, non-confrontational approach to eliminate the fragmentation of information across all the parties involved.
He spoke of the need to ensure competent resources backed up the governments plan to introduce a new national register of competent contractors. This issue is one we have every intention of developing with new links from within the CDM ToolKit™.
Options
Our new Wide Area Networking offering was announced at the CIRIA seminar and we are looking for our first customers. The new Forms Editor will become an option at the end of June and will allow users to design their own forms from data available within the CDM ToolKit™ database to designs of their own choice. This will be a very powerful feature, particularly for our Corporate and Networked users wanting to standardise their own reporting. We will be releasing the Permissions Matrix and the initial version of the O&M Manual at about the same time. A number of customers have indicated their interest in these options through the Marketing Survey that was circulated a few weeks ago. Please contact us if you need additional information.
Customer News
This month sees the addition of another major Blue Chip customer to our base. Eutech is the consulting arm of ICI. Having presented to their Health & Safety group some months ago, they were impressed with CDM ToolKit™ 2000 and saw this as a superb vehicle for their own Knowledge Base material. Set up as components of their own library, they see the CDM Toolkit™ as a resource that will allow information to be disseminated across their entire network quickly and easily.
Product Upgrades
CDM ToolKit™ 2000 Service Release 1 is due for installation on the early bird sites in the first week of June. This build includes a much improved forms editor and word processing module and will be shipped to the majority of users towards the end of June. The forms editor overcomes some earlier limitations on document size and the rate at which it put together some of the more complex reports. In addition, the functionality offers a save to file feature that proves an easy output to Word and other word-processing environments.
Shipping News
We are shipping the remainder of the first batch of upgrades to those who have requested them at about the same time as you will receive this Newsletter. The functionality of this release version is substantially unchanged in the Service Release currently under trials. Users should not delay its installation because it provides both substantial benefits and a learning curve over version 3. However, the Service Release will include an upgrade path from version 3 for those who want to wait a little longer or simply start again having run the 2 versions in parallel in the meantime.
End of Free Upgrade Offer
If you were licensed to use version 3 before the end of last September and have not already returned your application form for the free upgrade to CDM ToolKit™ 2000, please note, you only have until the end of June 1999 to submit it for free!
CDM ToolKit™ 2000 Training
The training Courses at Milton Keynes have proved to be very popular with anther full house this week. The next on 15 Jun 99 is nearly full and we are looking to book one in July and another in September depending on demand at £85 per session. We are proposing to provide an ‘Advanced’ course for those ready to move onto some of the more detailed parts of the software. Please let us know your requirements.
Next User Forum
The next User Forum will be on 30th Sep 1999 at Milton Keynes. Please put the date in your diary now. We will write to you nearer the time with details of the event and a registration form.