Devonport City Council Implements AvePoint Opus to Maintain True Compliance & Simplify Workflows
Success Highlights
Customer Location Devonport, Tasmania
Industry Public Sector
Platform Microsoft 365
The Devonport City Council is a local government body located in the city and surrounds of Devonport in Tasmania. As an organization, the Devonport City Council works in partnership with all levels of government and local community members to deliver services to the Devonport community.
Critical Needs
- Mitigate end-user burden of following additional record-keeping processes
- Maintain compliance with record management regulations during and after their transformation
- Migrate from legacy systems to Office 365
The Challenge
The Devonport City Council engaged with AvePoint in February, 2019 when they decided to move to Office 365. They wanted to leverage Office 365 as a record management platform, but were worried the native capabilities wouldn’t meet the Council’s compliance obligations under the Tasmanian Archives Act of 1983.
“We’ve been looking to be a fully [digital] workplace for quite some time. About two years ago we had a new Executive Director start, who had a real change management agenda…” said Debbie Murphy, records officer, Devonport City Council. “So we went to Office 365 and SharePoint [Online] in particular to work with our living documents.”
A significant motivator to fully adopt a cloud environment was most of their workforce recently started using laptops. With the ability to now work together from anywhere, Devonport City Council needed a seamless way to merge and integrate content from on-premises applications such as Microsoft Office, Outlook, and Windows File Explorer.
“It was important to us that people could collaborate any time, any place, and share documentation to enhance and improve productivity,” said Murphy. “The other things we were looking for were to minimize the cost of onsite services to really increase user engagement.”
Records Officer, Devonport City Council
The AvePoint Solution
Following the implementation of AvePoint’s Office Connect—which integrates pre-existing Microsoft desktop applications with SharePoint, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Office 365 Groups—the Devonport City Council now has true collaboration.
Murphy elaborated, “We have people sharing documents, going to meetings, working on the same document. They don’t have to go away to edit the document, it’s just done right then and there – which is fantastic.”
And now with AvePoint Opus (formerly Cloud Records), Devonport has a proactive compliant approach.
“We have our records management governance within SharePoint, and we even have a window in SharePoint that helps us as records managers look at, manage, and dispose of information – which is fantastic,” said Murphy.
The Road Ahead
Overall, Murphy is most pleased with the fact that there is no end-user burden after implementing Office Connect and AvePoint Opus together.
“Most importantly, users are working the way they want,” said Murphy. “They’re using the apps that they normally use and doing everything in place. They don’t have to go out of the system to manage their documents.”
