Customer Solution Case Study
/ Microsoft Legal Group Turns to Company’s Own Software to Improve Document Management
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing—High tech
Customer Profile
Based in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft Corporation is the worldwide leader in software, services, and Internet technologies for personal and business computing.
Business Situation
The Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) Group had a document management system that was complex, highly customized, expensive to support, and incompatible with newer desktop software.
Solution
Microsoft LCA used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to build its own solution for document and records management.
Benefits
Greater productivity
Increased collaboration with outside parties
Reduced risk
Rapid implementation / “With only 200 hours of effort, we’ve been able to configure SharePoint Server 2010 to meet all our document and records management needs, migrate documents into the new solution, and completely eliminate iManage from our environment.”
Nishan DeSilva, Director of Information Management and Compliance, Microsoft Corporation
The Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) Group had several document management solutions in use, one of them being hard to use, expensive to support, and having an extremely low adoption rate—characteristics that eventually led to a complete lack of compatibility as newer versions of the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office were adopted. Microsoft LCA used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to build its own solution for document and records management. Built and deployed with only 200 hours of effort, the new solution is delivering greater productivity, increased collaboration, and reduced risk.
Situation
The Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) Group consists of 987 attorneys, paralegals, and business professionals. Microsoft LCA was named “Best Legal Department for 2010” by Corporate Counsel magazine.
In early 2010, the LCA Group set out to improve the consistency, predictability, and efficiency with which information assets are created, shared, secured, reused, and retained. Several document management systems in use were a major contributing factor to the challenge at hand. One in particular, Autonomy’s iManage WorkSite, contained 85,000 documents that were still of business value even though practitioners have not been able to access the system since October of 2008 due to compatibility issues.
“Our iManage solution was complex, highly customized, and expensive to support,” says Nishan DeSilva, Director of Information Management and Compliance at Microsoft Corporation. “It had its own rigid structure and way of doing things, requiring extra steps for tasks such as saving a document. Because of limited use throughout LCA, it wasn’t cost effective to continue paying for upgrades to newer versions of iManage. And because the version we had didn’t work with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Office 2007, or Office 2010, users have essentially been unable to access the system since they started using prerelease versions of those products. For some time, a dedicated machine running Windows XP and Office 2003 was maintained by IT for the handful of iManage users, but even that approach became problematic. We essentially gave up trying to access iManage two years ago.”
Solution
Microsoft LCA used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to deliver a compliance-driven document and records management solution, with flexible information-tagging taxonomies that correspond to practice-level work. The group also used Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to deliver a search experience tailored to the needs of its legal practitioners.
Today, practitioners use the integrated content management and collaboration features in SharePoint Server to work—and work together—more productively and effectively. Behind the scenes, SharePoint Server features such as content types, unique document IDs, document sets, metadata inheritance, workflows, retention policies, in-place records management, and role-based access help streamline processes, ensure compliance, and control access to documents.
Practitioners access the solution using both its web-based interface and Microsoft Office Professional 2010. They use Contributor Pro—a solution from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Colligo—to access, capture, and tag content contained in SharePoint from within the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client, and can drag email and attachments from Outlook into SharePoint Server.
Benefits
Microsoft LCA’s move to centralize document management on Microsoft software is delivering several key benefits:
Greater Productivity
Microsoft LCA has reduced the time and effort required for common tasks—beginning with finding documents. Recently-used documents are accessible from inside Office 2010 applications, which provide one-click access to SharePoint document libraries. Practitioners can use the document ID service in SharePoint to go directly to a document, and can use metadata-based navigation and filtering in SharePoint to quickly isolate a desired subset of documents in a SharePoint library. Practitioners can also use information-rich search results to quickly find documents, and can filter initial search results based on metadata contained within documents and metadata extracted from their unstructured text.
It’s also easier for practitioners to create, profile, and save documents. Standardized templates are at their fingertips, and new documents automatically inherit default metadata based on content type and the location to which they are saved. Use of the new managed metadata service in SharePoint 2010 further reduces the amount of user input and guesswork required to tag documents, helping ensure that they are classified consistently.
Practitioners are also more productive when authoring documents because they can do more things within the Office applications they use throughout the day. For example, document metadata, change tracking, comparison, version control, check-in/check-out, and document scrubbing tools are all accessible within Microsoft Word 2010, which enables two or more people to edit documents stored in SharePoint Server 2010 at the same time.
Increased Collaboration with Outside Parties
Microsoft LCA is improving collaboration with external parties by also taking advantage of SharePoint Server to facilitate controlled access to both internal clients and outside counsel. DeSilva sees the workflow and extranet capabilities of SharePoint Server being especially useful in outsourcing work to external law firms—and in transitioning those vendors from hourly billing to fixed rates. “In the past, outsourced work was communicated and tracked using email and other ad-hoc forms of communication,” says DeSilva. “Moving forward, we’ll be able to make those processes more consistent, reliable, and predictable.”
Reduced Risk
Microsoft LCA has comprehensive tools in SharePoint Server for controlling document access, ensuring proper retention, and applying other content management best-practices. The group can provide access to specific users or groups of users; configure auditing and retention policies based on content type and location; and promote and enforce consistent document tagging—all without placing undue burden or restriction on practitioners.
Rapid Implementation
Microsoft LCA implemented the entire solution infrastructure and first three business sites in only four months—work that included the migration of 85,000 documents from iManage to SharePoint Server 2010. “We focused on what we could do with SharePoint Server out-of-the-box, staying away from custom development that would have made the solution more expensive to implement and manage,” says DeSilva. “With only 200 hours of effort, we’ve been able to configure SharePoint Server 2010 to meet all our document and records management needs, migrate documents into the new solution, and completely eliminate iManage from our environment.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to: