With London Social Media Week fast approaching, I worked late one night last week sorting out the crowd-sourced nominations for the second running of the Be2Awards, which are being held at London’s Building Centre on the afternoon Wednesday 26 September (register here). As with the first running of the Awards last year, the winners are decided by online voting, and I have started to see some Tweets and emails flying out from some of the contenders to get their supporters to vote for them. The candidates in the best AEC collaboration category, for example, are: 4Projects, Asite, Conject, McLaren’s FusionLive, a proof of concept called BIMClouds, and Eneo. The latter is a new name to me (and perhaps many others).
Ene-who?
Eneo describes itself thus:
Eneo is a web service which facilitates easy, fast and effective document distribution in the construction world, to as many parties as required. Upload your project documents, create recipient groups and keep an overview using the distribution matrix. Using Eneo will save time for both sender and recipient. Distributing and printing of documents has never been easier and more under control.
A closer reading of Eneo’s still-rough-at-the-edges website (see about Eneo), however, revealed that it is a new web service developed by Netherlands-based Océ (today part of the Canon group) for distribution of documents in the AEC industry. It is an industry-specific “in the cloud” web service which makes a virtue of its simplicity and ease of use. For integration with third party systems it has an API (application programming interface), and a plug-in for SharePoint 2010 is also available. And as one might expect from a corporation better known for printers and copiers, “Eneo is linked to a network of professional print business who can fulfill any print requirements promptly.” Eneo provides each project 1GB of data space for all documents as standard. Starter packages for up to five projects and 50 project members cost £125 (see pricing page).
It is therefore another competitor in the AEC file-sharing sector which is promoting its simplicity to potential users (last month, in my post about Xpin, I mentioned three other vendors pitching themselves as low-cost, simple, construction-specific collaboration platforms). I would also list Eneo alongside Océ’s rival reprographic hardware corporation HP which launched its own SaaS-based cloud storage service, ePrint & Share nearly two years ago (post), and which is continuing to market itself to UK users (I wrote about its Android app launch in May 2012, and I have been invited to a forthcoming event at the RIBA in London on Monday 24 September, for example).
