READING BOROUGH COUNCIL is responsible for the local services for around 155,000 residents including education, planning and transport. There are 16 wards in the borough, each represented by three councillors.
The Council’s vision is to be: A highly regarded, leading Council; ambitious and focused on what matters most for our communities, delivering value for money and quality services.
“We use Glasscubes to enable our drive for increased efficiency and productivity – in particular the ability to instantly update files and distribute information. Effective communication is particularly useful in our Project Management activities, which achieves a noticeable saving in time.”
TRACEY SLOAN
Business Partnership Manager, Reading Borough Council
The Challenge
"The Digital and ICT Programme required a collaboration and file sharing solution that met the Council’s stringent data and network security specifications, particularly where there is a need to interact and share information with external partners. We initially employed Huddle to do that. However, we found that we needed additional administrative functions, which would allow us to easily manage workspaces and control our account to ensure we do not waste money paying for unnecessary numbers of users”, explains Sloan.
The Migration
The Council’s 250 users were migrated over a weekend, which meant that there was minimal disruption to their working environment. Huddle was suspended at the end of business on Friday and users were invited to Glasscubes on the Monday morning.
“Feedback from our side is really positive, the Glasscubes On-boarding Team were a great support through the migration. All data is present and correct and I’ve had minimal requests for help. Either the application is so easy to use that people don’t need help, or they are using the Live Help facility but I’m getting very little noise at my end”, says Sloan.
“We moved from Huddle to Glasscubes and have found that Glasscubes represent far superior value for money, whilst also having extra features and a better user experience.”
STEPHEN MOTT
IT Project Manager, Reading Borough Council
The Solution
Glasscubes allows the Council to securely share files both internally and externally. Online workspaces are used for a wide variety of projects and incorporate the ability to share information and easily communicate with all relevant parties. All of this is in a permission based environment that they control with the ability to set individual user permissions, which dictate what users can contribute.
“Glasscubes is an enabler for staff and third parties (particularly Health) to work collaboratively in a safe and secure way. We are running our Digital and ICT Programme through the platform and no longer produce a paper agenda and other meeting documents, such as business cases and proposals.”
