Implementing an EDRMS for Local Government using SharePoint

January 20th 2023

Most local and regional government organisations have 1,000s of employees working across a diverse range of services and departments.

Microsoft 365 is a prevalent platform providing core digital services covering authentication, email, chat, voice automation and document management. Many organisations are now driving consolidation to Microsoft 365 services across their IT portfolio, not only because this reduces overall IT spendingĀ but it simplifies information security and compliance with regulatory obligations.

However, a commonplace challenge is that delivering an EDRMS which provides regulatory compliance and feature parity with a traditional EDRMSĀ is just not achievable with Microsoftā€™s document management service provided by SharePoint Online out of the box. Thus, delivering consolidation and realising the associated benefits is challenging.

We designed Filer with several public bodies specifically to tackle these challenges, enabling local and regional government organisations to implement a native Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Online EDRMS, which is highly configurable and can address the requirements of various services whilst aligning to a Cloud-first strategy.

Filer is delivered on top of SharePoint Online. So your data resides in SharePoint Online. This ensures data management and security can be managed centrally through Microsoft 365. Furthermore, Filerā€™s supporting infrastructure is hosted in your Microsoft Azure tenant, allowing full compliance with data residency requirements.

There are numerous benefits to this approach:

  • All data stored in Microsoft 365 services
  • Centralised data security and compliance
  • Consistent and familiar user interface
  • De-commissioning of on-premises infrastructure and legacy EDRMS
  • Reduced software licence and maintenance costs
  • Cloud-first modern technology platform
  • Seamless integration with all Microsoft 365 services (Power Platform)
  • Digitise paper stores and paper-centric solutions

Filer is suited explicitly to providing digital ā€˜case filesā€™ integrated with Line of Business systems (e.g. Liquid Logic). The intuitive case file viewer eases adoption and simplifies change management processes.

Filerā€™s open API allows for simplified and standards-based systems integration and natively supports industry-standard document scanning technology for delivering end-to-end digital solutions. We also work with a host of scanning partners who can review, process, classify and ingest paper documents directly into Filer.

Together with Councils / Local Authorities, we configure Filer by their Information Governance Policy and statutory and legislative requirements. We create the Information Architecture to ensure the system is configured with the correct metadata, classification structure, access types, and demographic information to suit the need of the department (e.g. Green Claims, Adults Social Care Services, Childrenā€™s Social Care Services, and more).

To see what benefits Filer can bring or how to adopt an M365 native EDRM solution, please get in touch with us.

Author
Dan Kong

Sales Director

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