Spiralling support costs forced the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority to standardize its software and replace an old CRM application that was based on Lotus Notes.

The authority's records coordinator Stephen Parkes, said the old CRM became a burden after it deployed the Dataworks electronic documents management system (EDMS) back in 2004.

"The old system, which was based on Lotus Notes, became a silo and was expensive to support since we used Dataworks for all our other applications," Parkes said.

"We decided to change when we discovered Dataworks had CRM so it served our purpose for better interoperability and integration."

Parkes said it is the only government authority to use the Dataworks package to manage 519 tenancies over more than 400 hectares of land between Garden Island, White Bay and the west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Its main offices are in Darling Harbour and the Rocks.

He said the CRM package was deployed over 12 months from October last year and has boosted requests from about 450 per month to over 1000.

According to Parkes, the authority can now more easily track jobs posted by staff and tenants and can better manage its buildings, while its remote sites can be easily accessed via Citrix.

He said transferring data from the old system into the Dataworks CRM was easy "from a technical side", noting there were no problems with implementation.

The authority's success with CRM and its use of e-learning to train staff via scenarios created in Macromedia Captivate recently earned it the Dataworks award for recognition of excellence, best practice and innovation and creativity, which Parkes says has helped it "gain prominence for the product, making it more attractive for staff to use".