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The Internet is being increasingly used as a communication backbone of the construction industry. Through Web browsers and other standard tools, design and planning communication and information exchange take place. Several dotcom companies are offering such collaboration environments for rent. However, these environments are closed, project-centred and only provide for file level information exchange in basic document management. ISTforCE (Intelligent Services and Tools for Concurrent Engineering) is a European 5th Framework Information Society project (2001-2003) aimed at developing technologies for the next generation of such collaboration platforms. The substantial novelties in ISTforCE are that (1) it provides a personalised human-centred environment, enhancing current, less flexible project-centred approaches,(2) it sets up an open collaboration platform where new services and tools may be easily integrated and where providers of engineering information, services and tools meet project managers, engineers and architects,(3) it makes flexible and customisable object-level data exchange possible, and (4) it provides an infrastructure for on-line e-business by integrating seamlessly legal and financial transactions, at all system levels. In this paper we present the actors and use cases of the ISTforCE environment, the overall multi-tier client-server architecture, the basic interoperability cases and the top-level GUI of the ISTforCE prototype.