Victoria’s Department of Treasury & Finance is implementing enterprise search across the organisation as it completes the migration of several million documents on shared network storage outside TRIM into a more managed environment.

An enterprise search solution from ISYS Software is being deployed by DTF to provide staff with the ability to perform federated searches across TRIM and a range of other information repositories.

In the past, staff would need to perform separate searches on TRIM, various Lotus Notes databases, the intranet, Treasury & Finance Library and external Web sites.

“We were looking for something that could provide much better integration across all of those repositories, and user feedback pointed towards a Google model of searching inside the organisation,” said Vanessa Hose, Manager, Knowledge & Information Services.

“The ability to ensure appropriate access control with ISYS was very important for us,” said Hose.”

Since 2006 Victoria has operated a shared TRIM environment for the Departments of Treasury and Finance (DTF), Premier and Cabinet and the State Services Authority. There are around 1300 users across all three departments that use TRIM to varying levels.

TRIM 6.2.2 is part of the standard operating environment (SOE) that is packaged up and deployed across the three organisations. It integrates with Lotus Notes email and Microsoft Office 2003 running on Windows XP. Victoria’s Department of Treasury & Finance provides business support for all three organisations.

The Victorian government IT shared service provider CenITex delivers infrastructure and database management for TRIM.

“We have a departmental KM strategy and obviously the role of an EDRMS is very important in the information and content management aspects of that strategy,” said Hose.

“We are looking at TRIM 7 and what opportunities that gives us to leverage TRIM better in business applications, and for making TRIM available through portal-type functionality on our intranet.

“We are aware of the integration between SharePoint and TRIM and it’s on our radar but we don’t have any immediate plans to implement SharePoint.

“Attachments on our intranet are generally TRIM links and increasingly we are finding people will send around TRIM links through email. We may at some point in the future look to imposing a technological limitation on the size of an email that can be sent internally to encourage this practise.”

Treasury & Finance manages state budget development and provides economic and financial policy advice to government, as well as coordinating government services and contracts.

The majority of documents it generates are for internal review and collaboration while all incoming correspondence is scanned and registered into TRIM at the point of receipt. There is no OCR or automated classification applied to incoming documents at present and this is something the department is planning to address.

“We’re exploring options including looking at what we can do with the Kofax technology that we already have,” said Hose.

“There’s a high degree of collaboration around certain processes between Treasury and Premier and Cabinet. Because of the decision to have two separate TRIM databases, there is a level of complexity around how we work together. We also need to collaborate with many other parts of Victorian government around a range of activities including budgeting and financial management.

“We are looking to improve email integration within the next few months. We’re about upgrade Lotus Notes to version 8.5 and we will be working to improve the integration as part of that project.”