Largest Ever SharePoint Records Management Solution

#1 Global Award-Winning Project

This implementation of SharePoint for records management, for Rockwell Automation, led to Microsoft awarding Concurrency “2012 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Content Management.” Concurrency was honored among all Microsoft partners worldwide as #1 for content management solutions.

Summary

Rockwell Automation’s internal legal and intellectual property department needed a solution to alleviate disorganization and improve onsite and remote workflow practices. The department also wanted to set an example for the company with regard to information security and records management. The challenge was to provide a system specifically tailored to the legal department’s needs, which would be easy to use and also provide sufficient structure for integrated information security and records management.

Rockwell Automation’s need for a solution scalable to large size required an infrastructure platform carefully designed to accommodate data expansion. Concurrency leveraged its established work program, initially conducting an Infrastructure Review, and then developing a SharePoint Infrastructure Design to accommodate the capacity, performance, availability and recovery requirements of the business.

Concurrency then planned and implemented the production environment. Concurrency built the infrastructure on base Windows Server 2008 R2 platforms and set up the SharePoint server farm consisting of SharePoint 2010 Web Servers, Application Servers, FAST Search Server, Domain/Active Directory Servers, and a SQL Database Server. Concurrency worked in close coordination with multiple additional Microsoft partners, including K2, Idera, Fujitsu, and Harmon.ie.

The intricacy and sophistication required in the infrastructure and taxonomic planning for a solution scalable to 30 terabytes required close partnership between Rockwell and the Concurrency consultants, who gained a detailed understanding of the company’s needs during provision of sites by metadata type. As a whole, the project comprised more than four web applications, more than two hundred site collections, and more than 500 sites. Site collections were planned in fine detail before roll-out to ensure space requirements would be met.

Client Summary

“Prior to implementing their SharePoint solution, electronic records management within Rockwell Automation’s legal department was entirely manual and only performed as part of a records clean-up activity driven by our corporate records manager. Now records management is process driven and automated, greatly improving both efficiency and compliance to corporate records retention policy. This is serving as an example for the rest of Rockwell Automation.”

Solution Highlights

• Concurrency implemented a SharePoint 2010 records management solution scalable to 30 terabytes.
• The Records Center is likely to eventually contain in excess of 100,000,000 records.
• The project comprised planning and deployment of the SharePoint 2010 platform; the Information Architecture for the SharePoint 2010 sites; and build-out and testing of the SharePoint 2010 sites.
• The project’s large scale required extremely detailed attention to taxonomic and infrastructure planning.
• Concurrency implemented SharePoint according to Rockwell Automation’s specific records management procedures and document retention policies.
• The SharePoint solution made possible collaboration with outside counsel to allow joint review of matter files.
• Concurrency uncovered some limitations of SharePoint 2010 during this project, which led to SharePoint enhancements rolled out by Microsoft to all users in Service Pack 1, thereby benefiting all users worldwide.
• Rockwell Automation is now exploring roll-out of a SharePoint solution company-wide.

Business Value

Without a doubt, the most critical value provided by this solution relates to management and security of legal documents, including their disposition according to established policies. While the economic benefits of limiting legal liability are difficult to quantify, other benefits are more readily quantifiable. For example, automated processes relieve records-management employees of manual processes. Other personnel-related benefits are derived from the collaborative side of the solution, which allows secure collaboration of both internal staff and external legal counsel. Huge benefits in search have also driven business productivity gains.