The NZ government body that administers Maori-owned land is making a move to SharePoint to handle information management.

The Māori Trustee organisation works from six offices around New Zealand and is responsible for  100,000 hectares of Māori land, 130,000 client accounts and $NZ135 million in funds.

A team of 70 staff currently work within a Microsoft mail and application environment, with corporate applications OpenText LiveLink  EDRMS, a Property Management System developed in Fox Pro and the TerraView GIS application.

According to tender documents, the 90-year old organisation has accumulated a large information resource, with much of the paper and electronic records that have been created and captured over such a period “of significant value and play critical role in the daily operations of the organisation activities.  These information resources have become scattered and somewhat disparate making the efficient use of these resources increasingly difficult and the ability to apply suitable records management process complicated. “

An information technology strategy developed since mid 2010 seeks  to ensure that “Māori Trustee information repositories are reliable, easy to use, and easy to change and fit within the overall information and technology architecture.

At present Māori Trustee staff have limited automated mechanisms for many of its business processes.  It has no automated workflow for managing documents and approval processes.  A considerable portion of information is paper based and the existing document management and other systems are not integrated making many document processes slow, open for data duplication and making documents difficult to maintain. 

The organisation has previously relied on an OpenText Livelink document management system supplied by the Ministry of Māori Development, but separation from that ministry in 2009 encouraged staff to consider a new strategy.

The successful tenderer will need to assist with migration of more than 36000  documents currently in LiveLink and 4GB of fileshare data.

SharePoint has emerged as a focus as the Trustee is also looking to upgrade its property management system using Microsoft CRM and  Microsoft NAV. 

The tender for a SharePoint 2010 document management system follows development of a  high level taxonomy and information  audit.

A survey was carried out during this effort that highlight that the main problems staff encounter with the existing systems are related to slow response times, loss of connectivity and system generated error messages.

The  Māori Trustee  has stated that it prefers to work with local ' Wellington based' solution providers enabling regular face to face meetings to take place and for Māori Trustee to regularly visit and talk to the individual developers undertaking the work (not to the detriment of the project).