Business Impact Article - Posted 5/11/2007
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Chartered accountants profit from Document Management System
Reeves and Neylan, a Canterbury firm of chartered accountants, has been around for over 100 years. Its longevity doesn’t stop the company from using the latest technology. In this case, the award-winning firm wanted to implement a company-wide intranet to link up 175 staff in five offices.
The firm wanted to help its staff find information more easily. This meant routine things like policy documents and administrative information. It also meant information that could help staff to help their customers more effectively—such as client records, advice, and marketing literature.
Reeves and Neyland turned to Core, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to help it implement the system. It built a new intranet system using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The new intranet has become everyone’s home page. It contains company news, details of marketing activity, and links to accountant-friendly sites like the Inland Revenue.
However, the main benefit is the search facility, which the IT team has christened “The Guru.” It’s a service that employees can use to find the information they need to do their jobs. It links through to client files, correspondence, and e-mail. In addition to all the client files, Reeves and Neylan has uploaded over a thousand internal documents, including its staff handbook, policy on career development, health and safety documents, marketing guides, and technical literature.
“I can type ‘share scheme’ into The Guru, and up comes all the documents in our client files where the word appears,” says Clive Relf, one of the firm’s partners. “It’s like a Web search for everything my company knows.”
The main benefit is saving time. Searching is virtually instantaneous. The results screen includes the matching records and a couple of lines of text per hit as a taster. Staff can use the system to find documents that they can reuse or adapt, saving hours compared to writing something from scratch.
Historically, forms and documents were spread over hundreds of shared folders in Microsoft Office Outlook®. With no easy search facility for documents stored this way, it would take hours to find things. Not only that, but information quickly became outdated because people didn’t update the files regularly. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, all the relevant documents are owned and tagged and have review dates so that they are kept up to date.
“SharePoint Server is very useful,” says Relf. “It says ‘knowledge management’ on the screen, and it’s just that. It’s a great place to go for advice and information. Because of this, the search facility is very, very valuable.”
© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
