Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) expects a project to improve Microsoft Office integration with its SharePoint 2010 deployment for 1000 users will cost from $A100,000-150,000 to implement successfully.

The FWO is a Commonwealth statutory authority established in 2009  to investigate workplace complaints and enforces compliance with Australia’s national workplace laws.

In 2011 it deployed a SharePoint 2010 solution it has labelled as DocBank to replace a legacy document management platform.

http://www.idm.net.au/article/008145-fair-work-embarks-edrms-search

Staff at over 50 locations across the country currently use Windows 7 64-bit on the desktop and Microsoft Office 2007, with plans to upgrade to Office 2010 within the next two years.

The FWO is planning to migrate from physical record-keeping with HP TRIM to digital recordkeeping using a TRIM backend to SharePoint.

The tender called for a solution to provide document management functionality from within Microsoft applications rather than requiring staff to use the web-based SharePoint document library interface.

It wants better integration between its desktop and Office applications and SharePoint than is provided ‘out of the box’ by SharePoint.

In calling for the tender, the FWO provided an extensive “Wish List” of SharePoint functionality add-ons, although it does not expect that one vendor can deliver all elements.

The Wish List includes the following:
- Default option when saving email to DocBank is to save email and all attachments;
- Emails can be copied to DocBank (and retained in Outlook) or moved (and removed from Outlook);
- Documents and folders to which a user does not have access are excluded from searching and displaying;
- Creation of a new file inherits permissions from its parent folder;
- Creation of a new document optionally includes display of its inherited metadata and permissions and ability to change them;
- When saving, only one dialogue box is presented to capture all properties (e.g. name and classification);
- Able to access versions while editing a document;
- All mandatory metadata elements defaulted wherever possible – either from known information (e.g. date/time/user), or from default values the location into which they are stored.
- Audit logs maintained of all document updating and permission changing, preferably viewed as part of each document’s history; and
- Documents other than office documents can be dragged-and-dropped to DocBank – especially PDF.