Frank, Rimerman + Co., LLP Case Study
Industry
Financial Services & Insurance
Location
United States
Company
Certified public accountancy Frank, Rimerman + Co., LLP offers corporate tax accounting, audits, and financial reporting, as well as outsourced accounting, controller, and CFO services. The company’s 210 employees rely heavily on email for internal document collaboration and most client correspondence.
SharePoint at Frank, Rimerman
Senior management mandated that employees use SharePoint for internal document collaboration and to share documents externally with clients. To comply with Sarbanes Oxley and SEC requirements, final documents and pertinent emails need to be archived and managed in an Interwoven content management system, according to corporate retention policies.
While best practices for document collaboration were in place, the company’s SharePoint and content management systems were being used inconsistently.
"We faced a significant SharePoint adoption gap. Employees complained it was difficult to store documents on SharePoint, and storing encrypted documents with clients as well as uploading emails were even more problematic because both required additional steps. Instead, people resorted to storing documents locally on their desktop, or they dragged documents and emails directly into the CMS, creating a logistical nightmare as multiple versions of the same document were uploaded." - Michael Takita, Director of IT
Solution
In search of a more convenient SharePoint interface, people at all levels of the organization and in all practice areas downloaded harmon.ie for SharePoint, Personal Edition, a free Outlook sidebar which makes it easy to search, access, and store documents and emails on SharePoint.
"SharePoint is not as accessible as we’d like it to be, so when we heard about harmon.ie, we jumped on it right away. We love harmon.ie. It offers the easiest way to drag documents and folders into SharePoint and send document links instead of large files. Now I use SharePoint all the time, and people I used to have to drag into using SharePoint jumped right in and began using it." - Cristina Bell, Senior Manager, Accounting Services
Based on power users’ feedback, Takita signed up with harmon.ie’s Enterprise Partner program to get early access to the enterprise release. In October, the company deployed harmon.ie silently to everyone in the company using Microsoft Group Policy, without a hitch.
Results and Benefits
- Greater SharePoint buy-in. "We’ve seen a dramatic increase in SharePoint use among client-facing teams. We’ve also seen an improvement in document collaboration as more employees use SharePoint to co-author documents, both in the office and at home." - Michael Takita
- Reduction in ballooning email storage requirements. "Using harmon.ie, we anticipate a 30 to 40 percent reduction in incremental email storage requirements as people send links to collaborate internally on documents rather than emailing multiple versions of a document back and forth." - Michael Takita
- More reliable, consistent content management as document chaos is eliminated and final documents are stored together with applicable client correspondence.
Bring Everything Together in SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive
Unify your content – emails, documents, and conversations – drag and drop Outlook emails and attachments into SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive.
