University of Cambridge

"We have been working with Planon for eighteen months now, but there was a pilot phase before that too. There are so many problems with hackers and viruses and so forth these days that the administrators are always very careful about letting new applications loose on their network. The policy is to play it safe.

The initial decision to use Planon had been made based on an initial paper study, so we began with just two users and with dummy data. Planon themselves were very helpful – I think they knew that the pilot was simply a hurdle that the application would have to overcome and so they helped us set it up."

The speaker is Derek Southwell, the Database Manager who manages the accommodation for the University's educational buildings: some 320 properties totalling 650,000 m2 gross that are separate from the buildings belonging to the 31 colleges that make up this world-famous and venerable academic institution.