Bombela was formed to manage the Gautrain project, and needed to keep a numbered and referenced record of all the communication and documents produced and received by its employees. Until recently, one person fulfilled the role of document controller, and was charged with keeping a record of all the documents, which were saved on a fi le share. This was done in a single Excel spreadsheet, from which fi le numbers were manually allocated in sequence.
“Data was disparate and naming conventions were not consistent. It was diffi cult to fi nd information, as there was no simple way to mine the data held in the fi le share during a search,” says Sueleila Hendricks, business analyst for Bombela. “Documents could not be shared, limiting the team’s effectiveness and ability to collaborate on multiple-user projects.”
“SharePoint Server 2007 is an extremely powerful business tool, and it met all of Bombela’s needs.” - Michael Robinson, ECM software specialist, Intervate
Hendricks sought a solution that would provide a single repository for information that could be easily accessed by employees at Bombela, while working at their offices or off-site. “We needed a single, logical automated document numbering and naming convention to be applied to every document that goes through Bombela, and we needed a search facility that would make it easy to search for a particular document,” she says. “We also required a check-out and check-in document sharing facility.”
Michael Robinson, a developer at Enterprise Content Management specialists, Intervate, suggested Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 as the solution. “SharePoint Server 2007 is an extremely powerful business tool, and it met all of Bombela’s needs. It automatically caters for a central document repository, which is hosted on the company’s intranet. The sophisticated search functionality allows for easy access to documents regardless of a worker’s location, although the security protocols on the system are very tight, protecting the data from unauthorised users,” he says.