ICPR

Customer profile

Nine states – one river basin.

For the benefit of the Rhine and of all of its tributaries the members of the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine (ICPR), www.iksr.org, Switzerland, France, Germany, Luxemburg, Netherlands and the European Commission successfully co-operate with Austria, Liechtenstein, the Belgian region of Wallonia and Italy. Focal points of work are sustainable development of the Rhine, its alluvial areas and the good state of all waters in the watershed. Based on the ICPR mandate and EU legislation, work- & expert-groups manage all aspects covered in the ICPR treaties.

The ICPR is supported by the members of its secretarial office, located in Koblenz, Germany. Here an international team facilitates organizing meetings and translating documents in the three official ICPR languages (German, French, Dutch). Furthermore, the ICPR office fulfils an education role, functions as a communications hub for officials, experts, press and public.

Reasons for choosing O3Spaces

In striving for efficiency & quality improvements the ICPR had upon reviewing their internal processes concluded that there was room for improvement, and that this improvement could inter alia be achieved by increasing the effectiveness of the document creation, handling and distribution processes. The transfer and handover of documents between the different actors and disciplines with the ICPR, as well as, the lack of a secure centralized document repository where among the primary concerns. Furthermore, the actors within the larger ICPR community primarily relied on e-mail and a simple CMS as a means of document transfer.

The ICPR officials rightfully concluded that an ECM solution could provide the sought after functionality and improvements. In the selection process a fine balance needed to be struck in order to satisfy the primary functional requirements, assure ease of use, and comply with budgetary constraints. In the end the extensive feature set, ease of use and cost-effectiveness of O3Spaces Workplace proved to be very efficient.

O3Spaces Implementation

In an effort to minimize the impact of the introduction of O3Spaces on the every day routine, it was decided to implement O3Spaces according to a well defined phased implementation plan.

Following the deployment and implementation of O3Spaces Workplace on the existing hardware infrastructure available at ICPR, different portions of both the internal and external ICPR processes were migrated to O3Spaces. Only then were the different interfaces and 'hand-offs' implemented to ensure a smooth transition.

New functionality and improvements were gradually implemented in close harmony with the ICPR staff.

Technical infrastructure

The introduction of O3Spaces Workplace in the ICPR IT infrastructure did not impose any hardware or additional software costs on the agency. O3Spaces was installed seamlessly into the pre-existing infrastructure and runs on a Windows SMB server, MS SQL 2005 database system and Microsoft file server. O3Spaces has been configured to use the pre-existing Cobra user and contact database for system user information, and Workplace has been integrated into the MS Office 2003 suite as used by the ICPR.

Benefits of using O3Spaces

The use of O3Spaces Workplace at ICPR has resulted in clear cost and time savings. Laborious hand-offs and manual document transfers have been eliminated, and the centralization of documents has resulted in much improved control over the large amount of multi lingual document output generated at ICPR. Moreover, O3Spaces Workplace has become an indispensable tool for information discovery, which both internal officers, as well as external stakeholders have come to rely on.