Federal Government Agency

This Federal Agency is liable for the preservation of documentary heritage, to be a source of enduring knowledge accessible to all, to facilitate cooperation among communities involved in the acquisition, preservation and diffusion of knowledge, and to serve as the continuing memory of the government and its institutions.

As such, the Federal Agency is tasked with capturing and retaining important documents and email messages and maintaining them for the length of the requisite retention period. The Federal Agency is also unofficially chartered with setting the record management standard practice for the entire federal government.

The Federal Agency realized the recipe for success entailed making the business logic, document handling complexity, and retention policy details transparent to government employees. Also, finding a solution that did not require employees to change their daily work habits was highlighted as a key success factor.

The Federal Agency devised a transparent records management strategy that partially completely automated the record capture, classification, and storage process. Employees would continue to save documents and email messages into project folders on their desktop; the ‘system’ would partially- classify documents when they are added to SharePoint. For example, an employee working on a document related to an official government policy would save the document in a specific ‘Policy Project’ folder. From there on, the system would apply some of the document classification and record handling; users would only need to specific a small number of metadata properties in order to complete the classification process.

Although the official government Records Management solution, OpenText is not recognized by the vast majority of government employees, the Federal Agency wanted to take advantage of the ubiquity of its existing SharePoint deployments to capture documents since over 80% of agencies were already using SharePoint for document storage. A connector could then be employed to transfer SharePoint documents to OpenText records. The following two problems remained:

• Uploading documents to SharePoint is extremely challenging for typical government workers, and it requires a change in their daily work habits, both of which entail expensive training and indoctrination.
• Correctly classifying documents entails specifying many metadata values, most of which are unknown to employees. Incorrect or incomplete classification of documents would jeopardize the value of the records management project.

Like most workers, government employees spend a large portion of their day in their Microsoft Outlook email application. harmon.ie is a sidebar in Outlook (see below).

With harmon.ie, when an employee wants to save a document or email, they merely drag it from their email window directly into a project folder into the harmon.ie sidebar, whereupon it gets automatically uploaded into SharePoint. For example, dragging a document or email into a “Policy Project” folder means uploading it directly to the SharePoint folder where documents and email messages related to the specific project materials are stored.
“harmon.ie has nailed the SharePoint to Outlook experience and that is where people spend their day.”

During the upload, requisite metadata values associated with the particular folder are added to the document properties in SharePoint. The document is correctly and completely classified according to the government policy.
“Our users don’t know anything about metadata, document classification policies, SharePoint, or records management. All they know is harmon.ie.”