You find out a lot about a product or a company by finding out about the people behind it. Gary Craig is hardly a typical dot.com type of guy. At least that isn't a thought that would come quickly to mind when you first meet the man. You would think that here is a guy who has his feet firmly planted in the bricks-and-mortar world, a guy who takes care of business - rationally, methodically and resolutely. And that first impression would be certainly on target. No wonder - Gary is a licensed professional engineer with a Civil Engineering degree earned at the University of Toronto and a diploma in Operations Research picked up at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as a Master of Science in Management.

Upon further investigation, you would recognize that here is a guy who likes things to be organized, systematic and, above all, sensible. Beyond the hallowed halls of education, Gary has the real-world degree from the school of "hard-knocks". In his thirty-year career, he has been a real estate and construction manager, a designer and a builder. He has been involved in a lot of diverse projects ranging from ice skating rinks to hydroelectric plants to retail shopping complexes, including private real estate development. In the 70's and early 80's, Gary was heavily involved in the mall industry in the Northeast, including Pyramid Property's first enclosed regional mall in Burlington, Vermont. He understands very well the issues faced by both landlords and tenants in dealing with coordination of plans and their approval as well as management of construction at remote locations. In 1993, Gary founded Edgewater Services, Co., Ltd., a construction and project services firm. The Liverpool, NY-based firm lists some pretty heavy-hitters as clients including Eastman Kodak, Xerox and the US Postal Service.

ProjectEDGE.com was born from Edgewater Services' need for some sort of easier way to manage the sea of details that come with the massive construction projects that the company was involved in. Gary, having been involved with computers in construction for over 18 years, understood that computers were born to manage some complexities. He also recognized that in the Internet there was a channel to maximize and extend those benefits to the many parties involved in these projects.

As a result of internal needs, Gary and his staff developed ProjectEDGE. As Gary told us, "We originally created ProjectEDGE as a management system to control the development of our projects in which there were a diversity of players including engineers and architects, municipalities, tenants, lenders, contractors and sometimes joint venture partners. Our goal was to have a single database or integrated system of databases that allowed us to find all of our information in one consistent source any time we needed it, with security. What started as an internal application eventually became ProjectEDGE, an Internet-based Application Service Provider solution for owners, developers, tenants, contractors and everyone else involved in management of virtually any kind of project."

ProjectEDGE.com is, in reality, an Application Service Provider (ASP) that provides an Internet Extranet. An extranet is an Internet-based solution that allows a private business group to communicate, collaborate and even transact online. Extranets allow these groups to extend mission-critical resources over the Internet to partners, suppliers, customers, and other individuals outside the bricks and mortar walls. ProjectEDGE is just that, an Extranet that is compatible with software applications that most companies already use in their day-to-day business: Word, Excel, Outlook and other Windows applications such as CAD including the Corel and Lotus suites. Most participants can leverage their existing files and information easily.

ProjectEDGE is a tool for both retailers and developers. These are industries that are very cyclical in nature, have time-critical and detail-laden projects and often see more turnover than most industries. ProjectEDGE becomes a common project management tool and information repository for an entire team. Here the various partners can adopt and use a common process whether they work for the landlord or for the tenant.

For retailers rolling out stores, ProjectEDGE can be used to develop and manage automated workflows for placing orders and tracking each component of the project regardless of whether they are being handled by internal or external team members. It can facilitate the ordering and processing of contracts and purchase orders. Even a process such as delivering signage to new or renovated locations can be managed with a ProjectEDGE workflow process.

ProjectEDGE provides a vehicle for the storage of drawings both for the demised premises and the tenant improvements. It can manage the workflow process for the review, coordination and approval of the retailer's drawings in accordance with their lease. It becomes a place where retail contractors can obtain plans and specifications for new or renovated stores. The laborious process of preparing bid packages and distributing them to contractors for quotations is streamlined considerably. Such a system allows the retailers to quickly disseminate any new plans or revisions to the contractors no matter where the store is located.

Digital cameras allow a retailer's construction field person the flexibility of photographing a pre-construction condition of a store where those photos can be posted on the Web site for use by their personnel or by contractors. Site surveys become faster to review and more efficient. Weekly progress views of the site as well as any problems can be quickly uploaded to the Web site for review and analysis. Photos and other documents can be marked up with comments and remedies. Web conferencing tools, such as NetMeeting, can link users in multiple locations and they can simultaneously view drawings, photos, and documents such as a lease to quickly converge on a solution to an issue.

The issues concerning retailers are often the same issues that concern mall developers: managing large, time-critical and complex projects that generate thousands of pages of documentation that changes by the minute, not to mention tons of information and data that must be managed and updated pertaining to existing properties and their maintenance. ProjectEDGE was designed to simplify these sorts of issues and it does. For more information go to www.ProjectEDGE.com.