Independent Agency of the European Union Case Study

Internally, the client faces collaboration requirements where scientists must be able to quickly, easily, and concurrently access any data relevant to an ongoing study. “Of course,” the Document Management Coordinator at the independent agency of the European Union, explains, “employees should be able to retrieve documents… in a smooth way, in accordance with their expectations.”

The importance of internal collaboration for knowledge-sharing is not lost on anyone at the agency, but the ability to collaborate with clients across Europe is of paramount importance.

The clients are the benefactors of an entire agency that must remain organized and secure in order to adequately do its job. Any solution used at the agency must adhere to specific requirements, such as those pertaining to the storage of potentially sensitive data and information. These documents include not only scientific data, statistics, guidelines, and other assessments, but also documentation related to administrative areas, Procurement, Finance, IT, etc. When it comes to document management solutions, the agency needed a system that enables them to upload existing documents, access documentation efficiently, and create new documents based on standardized templates.

With the SharePoint migration taking place on-premises, the Document Management Coordinator pushed for the product she had been able to successfully configure on her own – even in the trial phase.

“What I liked about harmon.ie was the fact that I could download the trial version and I could… I did it myself,” she reported. “I mean, I have never been a developer… and I was able to do this by myself.”

With a collection of approximately 15,000 documents, agency employees were able to achieve document storage and accessibility that was better, faster, and more flexible than ever before. By making it easy for people to specify SharePoint metadata, contributors have been able to locate and retrieve documents more quickly, easily, and efficiently with harmon.ie.

The agency’s field of work is a rapidly-changing environment, so metadata definitions have to be flexible. Therefore, the agency enables employees to suggest new metadata definitions, some related to topics, some related to the target audience, and some related to activities. Suggestions are then added to an external system. SharePoint reads the metadata values from this external system.

“Based on this metadata, you can retrieve the documents that you need,” explained the Document Management Coordinator. “People just need to have their site to collaborate with people they are working for, a certain project-working group, whatever. And by having access to SharePoint from email makes people very happy because they all use Outlook every day to send emails back and forth and not having to leave that context helps drive collaboration.”

Adding to the interactive experience, agency employees reported very positive evaluations for harmon.ie’s interaction with Microsoft Outlook. This Outlook integration, reportedly, “is quite user-friendly, and it has good performance,” says the Document Management Coordinator.

The agency continues to offer training for harmon.ie through the use of training manuals and presentations – those that request material or training will receive it. To make it even more efficient for their employees, harmon.ie enables the agency to standardize their template(s), boosting employee productivity and expediting document production time.