Aussie oil watchdog takes Objective view

Australia's National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority (NOPSA) last week launched its Objective document and records management system but it remains tight-lipped about the costs.

The three year old regulator of occupational, health and safety standards for Australian offshore petroleum and gas operations turned down EMC's Documentum and Tower's Trim document and records management suites in favour of an Objective system.

The 45 seat contract, awarded in June 2007, has taken four months to implement, and will improve the regulator's ability to manage investigations and reporting, NOPSA's chief information officer, John Townsend, told ZDNet Australia.

Townsend would not say how much the contract is worth.

"The biggest driving factor for the new system was that we have to be able to back up our assertions. If we make assertions, especially if there is an investigation going on, we have to have systems that have a very good audit trail and that is easy to get at," said Townsend.

NOPSA also acquired three Dell Power Edge 2950 rack mounted servers to host the Objective system, a Microsoft SQL database and a PDF rendition engine.

Despite Microsoft's recent attempts to position SharePoint Server 2007 as a document and records management system, Microsoft did not respond to the public tender, Townsend said.