Dot Tel Domains For the Construction Industry
By Bill Rutherfurd

If you have worked on a construction site you will know that having up-to-date contact information is very important. Contact details of all the different people and businesses that play a role in any construction project are required.

The people involved in even a small residential project include builders or contractors, building inspectors, banks (often), property appraisers, surveyors, architect(s), and building supplies companies. Sub-contractors are even more numerous and include glass companies, flooring suppliers, roofers, stoppers, plumbers, electricians, telephone companies, and many more. Even on a small project there will be many people involved and these people need to contact each other.

The last thing builders want to do when on a job is climb down a ladder to get a phone number. The beauty of the mobile phone is that they can take calls on the job. A Dot Tel, however, gives them the freedom to make calls to anyone who is involved in the project. If builders or project managers want to sort out a problem fast the information to do so is immediately available.

Dot Tel is perfect for this industry and its value increases in proportion to the size of the construction project. Bigger projects have more people involved. In a project like an office building there are hundreds if not thousands of people involved. The first point of contact is probably going to be the site office located close to the entrance to the project. The organization's or individual's name is added to the project Dot Tel on contact, employment or arrival. Those contact details are then available to everyone.

The current best method for keeping project contacts is to have a computer on each floor of a construction project and a site intranet. Dot Tel, however, can be accessed on any device with an internet connection. In most projects the contact details are updated daily and circulated in paper form to all parties or all parties who would need those contact details. This is slow and inefficient. Dot Tel beats both of these methods hands down because it is much faster and uses much less data.

Dot Tel uses under 10k of data per page while most mobile phone internet web site pages use over 80k. It is therefore cheaper. Updates mean that everyone who is involved in the project is updated. There is no need for individual contact. This saves a lot of time and energy.

There are some details in a construction project that need to be kept private. Dot Tel provides for this with a tool called Telfriends. This allows details to be kept private and confidential. Financing and banking contact details would probably be kept private, as would some supplier details for commercial reasons.

An office tower Dot Tel could be divided up into floor sub-directories and/or job function sub-directories. A single one can hold up to 3,000 contact records, so on very large projects there might be multiple Dot Tels, if required. A contact for Level 2 Cabling, for example, could be found on a project Dot Tel at Project > Building Construction > Level 2 > Cabling > Business/Individual. They could also be found at Project > Building Construction > Sub Contractors > Cabling > Businesses/Individuals. There is a lot of freedom in how a directory is structured.

The potential savings offered by a Dot Tel on a construction project are very significant and possibly measurable (this may be the subject of a future article!). A project participant does not have to carry around a list and worry about getting a new copy or an update every day. They know that if the project office has done its job properly, any contact detail they might want is readily available on their mobile phone without the need for them to personally program it in.

In summary, this new Dot Tel technology offers opportunities for efficiency on a construction project or any project for which contact details are required. Dot Tel uses very low data and bandwidth, is simple to operate, and updates immediately for any changes in information. Ensuing articles from this writer will examine the use of them in construction in even more depth.

Bill Rutherfurd is an early Dot Tel adopter. He thinks it is very useful at providing a cheap web presence with fast access to contact data and information especially on mobile phones. He has a page on the construction industry at http://www.squidoo.com/constructiondottel. He also has a blog at http://www.dottel.blogspot.com.

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