Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM)

The Aztec Group’s aggressive growth strategy incorporated an in-crease in clients, staff and offices around Europe. As the business expanded the volume of corporate content was set to rise exponentially and a greater capacity solution needed to be implemented. Key requirements of the new system were to quickly access the right content across multiple jurisdictions with a growing client and staff base. The purpose; to maintain Aztec Group’s service levels through its robust processes and control framework by:

• Managing corporate governance
• Delivering high levels of employee productivity
• Providing customer service excellence
• Ensuring regulatory and legislative compliance
• Meeting local legal admissibility requirements

To address these challenges, it was decided that an advanced corporate Electronic Document and Management System was required.

Identifying the solution

Deltascheme initially helped Aztec Group design, build and deploy a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0) system to manage the Jersey jurisdiction’s client documents. At the same time this provided Aztec Group with the opportunity to evaluate the potential benefits of deploying SharePoint 2010 across the organisation. As a result of the successful work implementing WSS 3.0, Aztec Group chose to contract Deltascheme to help design, build and deploy a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 system across all four jurisdictions.

Implementing the System

Content Migration

Implementing solutions with SharePoint (e.g. document, records or content management) typically involves some form of data migration in order to preserve the intellectual capital of an organisation’s legacy systems. Deltascheme with its history of delivering document and record management systems has some significant expertise in this area.

As part of the initial WSS 3.0 deployment, Deltascheme adapted a Migration Tool to transfer GroupWise documents and metadata to WSS 3.0. Additionally, as part of the SharePoint 2010 deployment, Deltascheme used its own SharePoint Migration Tool to migrate content from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010, and migrate client-related electronic files from their NTFS file share to SharePoint (preserving system metadata values, such as Date Modified).

SharePoint 2010 design

The SharePoint 2010 design was based on the WSS 3.0 system, but introduced a number of improvements, such as the simplification of document libraries and the utilisation of new product features provided by SharePoint 2010, such as the taxonomy term store and drop-off libraries.

To enhance the system further, Deltascheme also recommended and provided;

• OnePlaceMail by Scinaptic
  To provide integration between SharePoint and Aztec’s Exchange/Outlook email system
• Adlib by Adlib Software
  To manage the OCR conversion of PDF files scanned using Multi-Functional Printer (MFP) devices located around the company.

The SharePoint information architecture design is based on five site collections, an Aztec Group Central core site collection, and four jurisdiction site collections – Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg and the UK. The Aztec Group Central site collection was configured as an Enterprise Content Type Hub – a new feature to SharePoint 2010, where site content types can be centrally managed and published across the farm. A number of content types were created, each of which made use of managed metadata columns that were designed to reference a central taxonomy of terms. The four jurisdiction site collection included a standard page layout and activated features – including the Content Organizer, which creates a Drop-Off Library. A document library template was configured and the published content types were applied. A document library was created for each client, based on the document library template.

Deltascheme developed SharePoint workflows to manage the Adlib OCR conversion of scanned PDF images. Each Jurisdiction’s MFP device is configured to scan to a Processing document library (seen as a web folder). A SharePoint workflow invokes Adlib to OCR the PDF image, and move the PDF image and text document to the Jurisdiction’s Drop-Off Library for manual indexing.

Content Organizer rules were created to automatically file any doc-uments added to a Jurisdiction’s Drop-Off Library with a particular content type and Client Code value. Documents scanned using the MFP devices or electronic documents uploaded directly to the Drop-Off Library are handled this way.

OnePlaceMail has been deployed so that users can simply and effectively capture pertinent emails and/or their attachments to SharePoint. OnePlaceMail does this by providing seamless integration between SharePoint and Outlook. Once installed, users are able to drag and drop emails or attachments from Outlook directly into SharePoint folders.

Deltascheme also tailored the Enterprise Search capabilities provided by SharePoint 2010. This enabled each Jurisdiction to have access to an Advanced Search page that allows users to target documents based on content type and metadata values.

Aztec Group chose to roll out Microsoft Office 2010 as part of the project. This means that the company benefits from the closer integration available between SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, including Office Web Apps and more logical methods of opening and saving documents from products like Word.

Benefits Achieved

Significant benefits to the effectiveness of the business were brought about including;

• Consolidation of client-related files, avoiding ‘silos’ of information with unnecessary restricted access.
• Greater opportunities for collaboration and the cross-sharing of information.
• Improved structure to document management, providing compliance, version control management and retention management.
• More effective search to find information quickly.
• Standardised methods of capturing paper as scanned documents.
• Corporate classification scheme to help standardise EDRM work methods.
• Improved response to client queries.

Future Plans

After a detailed handover of the system, Aztec Group intends to roll out the new SharePoint 2010 Document and Records Management system to all parts of the organisation. Subsequent phases will look at building some business applications in SharePoint such as the management of board packs.