Network Communications Manufacturer Case Study

The company was facing a challenge familiar to many enterprise organizations: the need to capture and store emails, documents, and attachments in an organized manner, so they could be found later on. Its employees had come up with their own solution-of-least-resistance: storing emails in Outlook, and storing documents on shared drives, in hundreds of different folders. This led to “folder creep” and unchecked duplication as more and more folders were created across multiple departments. Adding to the folder creep, documents were could not being cataloged and were often duplicated by saving multiple copies on the shared drives and by distributing copies via email attachments. Due to this document proliferation, the latest version could not be located when needed, to say nothing about the vast wasted storage space of duplicated document copies.

The first-level solution was to implement SharePoint, which allowed employees to store documents centrally and easily. However, this was not entirely successful in curbing the folder and document creep and did not address the need for proper indexing, storing and retrieval of files and emails. Employees found it hard to actually use SharePoint; in particular assigning metadata was too complicated.

The web systems administrator and SharePoint administrator, summed up the persisting issues: “When I looked at other team sites, I noticed that people seemed to see SharePoint as another file folder. Employees would create a new folder, and then a new one, and then a new one, essentially replicating shared drives now in SharePoint.”

Users, it turned out, were treating SharePoint like they had their personal Outlook clients and were still not applying the pertinent metadata to each file. This practice actually increased the problems it sought to solve, especially when employees shared documents as most continued to share as attachments in emails, exacerbating the version control

challenges. It was clear the company needed a better, easy-to-use and scalable way to ensure employees would not only adopt SharePoint and apply the proper metadata to documents, but also change the way they handled email attachments –from appending files to using SharePoint links.

The company’s Vice President and Chief Legal Counsel knew that unless his team helped solved the business need – make document sharing and storing seamless for employees, and solve for it easily and quickly – the company would not be able to meet the stringent regulatory and legal requirements expected.

The company had strict policies already in place to ensure compliance and audit standards were maintained, with SharePoint at the center of their knowledge and document management infrastructure.

“We’ve recently rolled out a retention policy that stipulates emails aren’t documents of record unless they’re stored in SharePoint,” explained the Chief Legal Counsel. “Emails in Exchange cannot be assumed records. If an email contains something important, you need to get it out of the inbox and put it in SharePoint.”

The company had run up against the Last Mile dilemma: employees could import attachments from emails in Outlook and stored on Exchange servers to SharePoint, but not the emails themselves. The company needed a solution that would allow the emails to be stored like documents, and one that would make it easy for employees to add the metadata needed for classification and retrieval of all SharePoint files.

Such a solution also had to accommodate the need for various departments within the company to access the same document from multiple SharePoint sites. Because attachments moved into SharePoint were stripped from their associated emails, it was possible that relevant information might be missing when the document was called up. What the company needed was a fail-safe way to get the knowledge management and compliance job done, every time.

The company found its “Last Mile” solution with harmon.ie and its seamless ability to add emails and documents to their proper destination in SharePoint, including the automatic indexing and classification of such documents.

Since the implementation of harmon.ie, its proven ability to reduce digital sprawl and improve metadata usage has made it the killer app for the company. It has made compliance with the company’s email retention policy simple and employees have embraced its ease of use through the Outlook pane. Though the project was born from business needs within the Legal Department, harmon.ie’s features are now being embraced across the organization – making the right thing to do, the easy thing to do for thousands of employees.

Next time, when you hear innovation, collaboration and compliance can’t live under the same roof, consider this company’s experience. Consider how they took the lessons learned from making SharePoint the company collaboration and compliance hub without the expected sacrifice for those who use the system daily. Add to that the increased adoption of SharePoint and you will turn those skeptics into evangelists.