Executive Summary (SharePoint as Document Management System)

Company: Town of Bluffton

Industry: Public Sector

Employees: 500

Overview: Rolled out SharePoint as Document Management System for the Town. The Document Management System was fully integrated with Microsoft Teams. This included automated workflows to read text inside Scanned Documents and approval workflows based on business requirements. All meta data of the documents was preserved. The system was fully capable of generating user-based as well as security-based alerts.

Solution: SharePoint as Document Management System

Background

The Town of Bluffton, South Carolina, known as the “Heart of the Lowcountry.” The Town of Bluffton, incorporated in 1852, is in Beaufort County, the most southern coastal county in South Carolina. Bluffton is adjacent to Hilton Head Island and is approximately twenty miles northeast of Savannah, Ga.

In 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau re-measured some of the fastest-growing areas in the nation. According to the Bureau, Bluffton’s population is now 15,199 residents and is the fifth largest town in South Carolina, in terms of land mass. While the population numbers still classify Bluffton as a small town; town representatives estimate the town serves, in terms of police services and for planning purposes, a daily population of more than 40,000 – 50,000 when tourists and visitors are included.

Town of Bluffton

When the Town of Bluffton decided to implement a Document Management System, we put our RFP out and Communication Square answered the call with great pricing and Customer Service. Through much work and input, Communication Square helped us develop our DMS in our SharePoint environment. They were extremely flexible as we changed our minds on what we wanted many times. Though we are still in the implementation phase, Communication Square has been very responsive and always willing to help us adjust and become more familiar with our new system.

Team
Project Managers

Opportunity

The Town of Bluffton lacked a centralized document management solution due to which their years' worth of existing data had become unmanageable. The departments had grown agitated with the time consumed in navigating and locating the required customer data as the absence of a DMS made it inaccessible.

To manage the considerable number documents used during the life cycle of construction projects, the Town needed to convert them into a user-friendly digital archive that could be searched, retrieved, and shared, while maintaining proper workflows so that all documents were handled in accordance with legal retention guidelines. This is where Communication Square LLC stepped up and proposed the deployment of SharePoint as Document Management System.

Solution

After carefully analyzing the Town of Bluffton’s requirements, Communication Square’s team decided to implement a SharePoint as Document Management System for secure storage of the town’s data in the cloud. Our team started by creating their DMS and sites for the various departments within to manage their documentation. The Town provided our team with various rules and workflows that needed to be configured, defining the way of structuring, and searching the documents across the storage. Our team applied these rules in organizing the documents into libraries and folders and searching them by metadata, so they developed a specific tool for the task.

Our team of experts went on to deploy the following functionalities in the Town’s Document Management System:

Approval & Rejection Workflows
Version History
E-Signature
OCR
Sync with PC
Meta Data

Benefits of SharePoint as Document Management System

The SharePoint based Document Management has become the central repository for the Town’s employees. They are using it to save documents, share quick information and save time. It is helping the Town improve collaboration to a great extent.

Here’s how the Town benefitted from the SharePoint as Document Management System:

The Town now has a centralized, digitalized document repository.
The processes of document submission, approval and visibility have been streamlined.
Searching for the required information is easier than before. It helps employees to save 35% of their productive time.
The Town is making better use of their Microsoft 365 license thus making it a cost-effective solution.
Team collaboration is enhanced because email notifications keep team members of their responsibilities and deadlines.