Adam Smith International Limited

Customer Profile

Adam Smith International Limited (ASIL) is a development-consultancy firm with projects in Africa, Middle-East and the Far East. ASIL is based in London, Delhi and Nairobi and runs project offices around the world. ASIL’s focus is on building capacity and reform in the heart of governments in developing and emerging economies. It provides and places senior civil servants and experienced professionals in the offices of host countries to provide policy and planning advice to the senior levels of the government.

Reasons for choosing O3Spaces

ASIL operates in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, South East Asia and East Europe. As a consequence of this geographical dispersal and the difficulties related to sharing knowledge and information, they were looking for a solution facilitate them in these crucial areas. "In the project that I manage, we faced the challenge

"In the project that I manage, we faced the challenge that our project team is in three locations that are not connected directly. We had an indirect internet link and we required a simple and secure solution for our team to use, to share knowledge and to capture information." says Nameer Al-Hadithi, project manager for ASIL in the Middle-East.

The decision to choose O3Spaces Workplace from amongst the candidate solutions they found was greatly influenced by the ease of use and security control O3Spaces Workplace provides out of the box.

"I tested several solutions and found the easiest to use was the O3spaces solution. I also saw the potential for future changes in O3Spaces to include features that we might need. Our users’ age and IT skills span a very wide range. We had to have a system that was simple to use and maintain. Also, due to security requirements imposed on us by the funding agency we had to have higher security controls such as SSL to/from the browser and user access control that can be monitored and quickly disabled if required.

O3spaces had the access control feature ready to go and the O3Spaces team integrated our own trusted security Certificate within the installation process to enable the SSL function."

Implementation of O3Spaces

The implementation of O3Spaces Workplace proved to be quick and easy. "The installation, configuration and implementation were all done in the same week," adds Nameer.

ASIL was also very pleased with the minimal training required to be able to use the O3Spaces application . All in all ASIL's new globe spanning document management and collaboration solution became an integral part of the daily operations in no time.

"We did a half day training for our team, but to be honest its not that hard to use. We explained some of the concepts and the way the site works, and they started to upload files that same afternoon."

O3Spaces as a service provider

At ASIL they were very pleased with the service the O3Spaces provided to during and after implementation of O3Spaces Workplace in the organization.

"Superb. I had the pleasure of working with a few of the O3 team on the implementation and to resolve issues and I have to say, they have been excellent. They clearly know their stuff and were able to accommodate our requests very well. I look forward to working with them again."

Benefits of using O3Spaces

Asked for the benefits of using O3Spaces Workplace at ASIL, Al-Hadithi enthu enthusiastically starts listing. The big benefits of using O3Spaces are: Security control/management, ease of use, clear separation of work areas and Web access from anywhere. Furthermore, the e-mail integration functionality O3Spaces Workplace provides is of particular value at ASIL:

"I think e-mail integration is vital. Once you have that the site can become totally contained. So a project manager like my-self can use O3 to run a full project from the site."