Objective has taken centre-stage at the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, winning a $A5M contract to roll out its ECM 8 content management platform to more than 5000 users over the next 12 months. Customs completed a major project to centralise its physical record-keeping in a single Canberra location in 2011, where records from eight separate state archives now sit in a facility with 19 kilometres of shelving. Customs has also implemented email archiving for the first time in 2011. Objective CEO Tony Walls said the ECM 8 deployment at Customs would become the department’s single source of truth, after a “big job” of importing content from fileshares and existing repositories. In 2007 Customs announced $A4.1 million deal with LogicaCMG to implement OpenText’s LiveLink ECM-eDocs software, however Objective will now be the only platform going forward. Last month the National Archives of Australia launched its Digital Continuity plan, seeking to drive Commonwealth agencies to undertake the transition from paper and other physical formats to digital formats. “This sits firmly at the heart of what Customs wants to achieve in obtaining compliance with the NAA’s plan going forward,” said Walls. The three-year agreement with Objective is worth approximately AU$5 million initially, with the option to extend the contract up to a total of nine years. Walls believes the vision that Objective has for the public sector is behind the gain in government market share in the past 18 months. “Our portfolio of solutions continues to grow,” he said. Customs and Border Protection creates a vast amount of information and records on a daily basis and “needs to talk to many other agencies, such as Defence, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Government Solicitor,” said Walls “Many of these agencies are also Objective customers. Part of our vision for connecting government is to assist how those agencies talk to each other.” One of the features of Objective ECM 8 that helped the Customs win, according to Walls, is the new lightweight browser-based Objective Executive client that also runs on mobile devices. “It offers all the ECM horsepower at the backend but requires zero training for the everyday user who just needs to search, read and contribute content, so it will help Customs get user adoption.” Under the agreement, Customs and Border Protection will also implement the Objective Discover search platform. This will allow users to conduct Internet-style searches, and then further refine the search by applying filters for categories, content type or many other criteria based on the metadata and content of their search results.