Shoosmiths

An award-winning SharePoint Document Management System. As a leading Microsoft UK partner, ClearPeople was selected to implement a best-of-breed DM solution that delivered tight integration with Microsoft Office including document and email management, to improve internal collaboration and efficiency across all of Shoosmiths’ offices.

Project Summary

Shoosmiths is a major UK law firm with 11 offices across the UK and more than 200 partners and over 1,500 staff. The law firm were using an OpenText Document Management System which was no longer fit for purpose – it was taking lots of time for employees to store, locate, share and collaborate on documents which was impacting on the businesses productivity.

Microsoft SharePoint was the platform of choice for Shoosmiths’ new document management system for the migration of over 6 million matter related documents. It was regarded as a leading-edge solution for Shoosmiths having leveraged learnings from other industries around document management rather than relying on incumbent providers within the legal sector only.

Shoosmiths were also able to effectively take advantage of SharePoint’s support of differential storage versions, reducing the storage capacity requirements significantly, while allowing for a firm wide document management infrastructure.

It was an important requirement that the project did not disrupt Shoosmiths’ operations and to maintain Business as Usual during the system upgrade, ClearPeople worked with technology partners on optimising the migration approach from OpenText.

The functionality of the legacy DM platform was matched and so that users were able to achieve the same outcomes, with special care for intuitive UI and UX to reduce the need for formal training. This solution included support for Third Party tools for tight integration with Outlook, for efficient email management.

Results

The solution has not only made the retrieval and storage of documents and emails intuitive and easy to administer meaning the time to find documents has been dramatically reduced, but it has also provided more consistency for the teams, standardising the way information is held and shared. The project triumphed at the Metalogix Best of Breed Awards, taking home the top prize for Agent of Change 2015 during Microsoft Ignite in Chicago and was also DM Project of the Year at the Document Manager Awards.

Key Features

• Store, organise and locate documents and emails
• Ensure the consistency of documents and emails
• Manage metadata for documents and emails
• Help protect documents and emails from unauthorised access or use