Author: gillian

Legal Services Provider Halsten Implements Custodian for Legal

Working together on files in a safe and efficient manner

MAASTRICHT/AMSTERDAM, 18 January 2018 – Transform Data International has today announced that European legal services provider Halsten has selected and implemented Custodian for Legal as its Legal Dossier & Project Management system.

Halsten had for some time been seeking a solution to share documents in a user-friendly and secure manner with its client group, a group that consists mainly of legal departments. Halsten was also looking to automate file handling and archiving internally in its business. User adoption, optimal security and accessibility of employee and client data were key considerations.

Halsten has been working with Office365 for quite some time and was looking for a solution that fits seamlessly into their system. With Custodian for Legal, Halsten has a very secure, affordable and future-proof solution that gives online and offline access to all dossiers with minimal effort needed from IT Management.

Custodian for Legal is a collaboration and document management solution, based on the Repstor product suite and utilises the powerful and familiar interface of Microsoft Outlook and other Office applications to ensure the highest level of user-adoption. Custodian for Legal is used worldwide by firms and companies including Boels Zanders, Morris law, Eversheds Sutherland, Gunnercooke & KANA.

Roel Hakvoort, operations manager at Halsten Legal commented: “After a proof of concept, the end-user adoption turned out to be high and the system met all our needs. Custodian for Legal integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook and other Office applications, enabling us to fully benefit from our investment in Office 365.”

Rob Kubben, managing partner at Transform Data added: “We are delighted to welcome Halsten to our customer base. A project like this shows once again that Custodian for Legal is not only suitable for large corporations but that also small and medium-sized companies can benefit from the functionality we have to offer.”

About Halsten
As a provider of legal services, Halsten acts as your external legal department. The team consists of corporate lawyers who have expertise and experience in various fields. Halsten works from its own locations in Amsterdam and Eindhoven and regularly at the locations of its clients throughout the Netherlands.

More information can be found at www.halsten.nl

About Transform Data International
Transform Data creates context based systems on the principle of “Business First, User First”. By prioritising business innovation and the end-user, Transform Data creates an environment that combines structured data, unstructured data and controlled activities within an intuitive user interface using renowned software products. Companywide adoption is the goal.
Transform Data provides solutions to many industries, but has a specific focus on professional and financial services organisations, law firms and legal departments. Transform Data’s solutions strengthen the adoption of Office365 and SharePoint. They ensure the optimal use of information within organisations. Transform Data helps organisations to optimize their employees’ total productivity by combining documents, tasks, workflows, external data and reports into one context based user interface.  More information can be found at: http://www.transformdata.eu/

Within just 6 months of launch, ES /Unity™ from Repstor & Eversheds Sutherland takes the corporate legal sector by storm

 

Providing powerful legal matter management using companies’ existing Office 365/SharePoint systems, ES/Unity has found a sweet spot with in-house legal teams, attracting major international clients in the UK, US and UAE

Belfast, October 10th, 2017 – Repstor, the ECM adoption company that helps businesses exploit their SharePoint and Office 365 investments, has reported even greater than anticipated early success for ES /Unity™, the new matter management solution it launched in March in partnership with Eversheds Sutherland, the international law firm.

National Grid, Wellcome Trust, Queen’s University Belfast, and Miral, an asset management company in the UAE, committed to ES /Unity within the first quarter after the product’s launch. A major banking group, a Canadian construction company, and a US multinational biotechnology product development company, are also in advanced discussions about implementing ES /Unity.

Repstor and Eversheds Sutherland have been struck by the scale of some of the planned implementations, having initially assumed small or medium sized companies would be ES/Unity’s main market. “But there is no limit to the product’s scale, and some of these implementations will be rolled out to over a hundred users,” Sheila Gormley, Repstor’s Director of Business Development, said.

A well-known UK transport organisation, two global oil companies, a European car manufacturer and one of the leading mobile operators in the UK are also talking to Eversheds Sutherland and Repstor about using ES /Unity.

“This impressive early success is testimony to the strength and positioning of the product, which makes it a very easy decision for firms, their users and their IT people,” Sheila added.

Introduced to the market at the annual British Legal Technology Forum in March 2017. ES/Unity combines Eversheds Sutherland’s own legal experience with Repstor’s technology expertise in extracting greater value from everyday Microsoft products (Repstor specialises in matter/case and email/document management solutions that work natively within Microsoft Office, Office 365 and SharePoint).

Beyond tangible productivity and efficiency benefits, teams using ES /Unity can continue to work as they always have, and transition to the cloud in a very low-risk way. This means they can work more flexibly and potentially source talent from a wider pool. The software also provides greater transparency and management information, enabling legal teams to demonstrate their value to the business.

The market opportunity for ES /Unity was confirmed by research last year (Raising the bar: Digital technology and the enhancement of legal services – The Looking Glass Report’, Winmark 2016). It found that budget issues, difficulties blending new and existing systems, and a lack of time to absorb change, were significant barriers to improving document management – particularly for in-house legal teams.

“There is no other product of its kind on the market,” Sheila noted. “Until now, in-house legal teams have had to buy specialist matter management solutions on top of their O365 / Microsoft platform investment, which can be costly as well as overkill for the needs of a corporate legal department. ES /Unity is different – it builds on systems that are already in use every day.

“The market response to ES /Unity has surprised us,” she added. “The most common reaction we get to ES /Unity is “It’s too good to be true!” Clearly it’s something teams have been waiting for.”

Repstor and Eversheds Sutherland also plan to target small and medium law firms with ES /Unity. “This is a huge opportunity in its own right, which ES/Unity addresses perfectly. But for the moment, we’re focusing on the pent-up need in the corporate market,” Sheila concluded.

The SharePoint Provisioning Engine

Need a provisioning engine for your custom Office 365, SharePoint Online and On-Premise solutions? Does customizing your SharePoint sites, creating lists and libraries using the Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) seem like a lot of effort? Instead of spending all that time and effort writing your own, why not use our tried and tested out-of-the-box SharePoint Provisioning Engine.

Our SharePoint Provisioning Engine is written using CSOM (the SharePoint Client-Side Object Model), providing support for SharePoint Online cloud deployments in addition to On-Premise and Hybrid environments. It provides an easy and practical way of getting a well-designed solution quickly deployed on the Office 365 platform, reducing the burden on your IT team.

Our engine performs the creation and set-up of SharePoint site collections, sites and sub-sites, lists/libraries, files and items, as well as content types, workflows, fields, views and many more customizations.

Many SharePoint developers are more familiar with the older Server-Side Object Model (SSOM). However, if you are creating a solution built on top of SharePoint Online that involves this type of provisioning then you will require a provisioning engine written using the Client-Side Object Model. In an On-Premise environment, CSOM is preferable since it provides a clear separation of concerns; your provisioning code will not be executing on the SharePoint server.

Our solution is a flexible, generic provisioning engine. It can be used to customise SharePoint storage structures containing ad-hoc content and metadata. Any custom SharePoint solution which involves the frequent creation of new Site Collections, Sites, Lists, Folders, Files and other content will benefit from the use of this scalable, tried and tested provisioning engine. Repstor has developers who are experts in CSOM and using our provisioning engine means your developers do not need to spend time writing their own while also learning about this new CSOM technology in order to successfully accomplish the task.

Our SharePoint Provisioning Engine is a highly scalable solution with a number of enterprise features such as queuing and templating. Templating can be done either from a pre-generated template or by using an existing live site or list as a template. It provides site provisioning from SharePoint Online with our hosted service in Microsoft Azure, and on-premises via a local installation.

The Repstor SharePoint Provisioning Engine will save your IT team time and minimise troubleshooting, you will be able to deploy updates, which add new functionality or contain bug fixes, easily and quickly to your solutions.

Technical features include:

  • Hierarchical provisioning, multiple levels of sites and sub sites with lists, folders, files
  • Templating from a pre-existing site or list, or a pre-saved offline definition
  • Highly scalable supporting Azure Queues and MSMQ for on-premise
  • Pluggable architecture with many entry points for customization

Contact us today to arrange a demonstration and see how we can help you to easily and quickly build and support SharePoint solutions for Office 365 and On Premise.

Microsoft Outlook Integration to Multiple ECM Repositories

Give access to ALL your content from within Outlook

Repstor affinityTM is designed around the user, delivering a familiar and superior experience when accessing multiple ECM repositories.  affinity provides a single, familiar and consistent user interface regardless of the content system being accessed. Different repositories appear as different folder structures within Microsoft Outlook. Repstor affinity is designed to integrate with ECM repositories easily – we use a powerful plugin model which allows us to include the most important functionality from each ECM system.

Current Repository Support includes:

Benefits of affinityTM multi-repository integration:

  • Provides consistent access to multiple ECM Systems:  In an ideal world, an organization would have a single ECM repository for all content.  However, legacy systems, departmental systems and individual ECM system’s niche functionality mean that most organizations have multiple content systems in active use.  With Repstor affinity you can provide consistent access to all content systems, avoiding confusing user interfaces and impacting Outlook performance and usability.
  • Easy transition between ECM Systems: Often, choosing a new ECM system results in a costly migration project to move information from previous systems to the new system.  With Repstor affinity multi-repository support, you can provide access to both the old and new systems through a consistent interface.  Repositories can also be made read-only to help the transition using configuration settings.
  • Delivers a simple, consistent user interface:  Repstor affinity is designed to maintain the usability of Microsoft Outlook.  This includes minimizing confusing new interfaces, ensuring that Outlook performance is not impacted, and providing additional functionality (like filing assistance) when normal Outlook functionality is not sufficient.  All of the affinity supported repositories maintain this design philosophy.
  • Offline access to content: Today’s users require access to content when convenient to them.  They cannot wait on slow networks, or slow servers or until they are back in the office.  affinity provides access to content from multiple repositories when on and offline.  All saving and retrieving from the content system is done in the background to avoid impacting the user’s experience.

Request a product tour to learn more…

Microsoft Outlook Integration to HighQ Collaborate

Managing your HighQ Collaborate content from within Outlook

Repstor affinity leads the ECM market with its extensive integration to multiple repositories. The affinityTM HighQ Connector provides users with easy access to your HighQ repository through the Microsoft Outlook interface. This allows organizations to unify internal and external collaboration in one secure space that can be accessed from anywhere.

The Repstor affinity connector for HighQ is ideally suited to scenarios where you want to provide users with a single point of access from within Outlook to all content from the HighQ, Microsoft SharePoint, HP TRIM, iManage Work® (previously HP/Autonomy WorkSite) or other repository supported by Repstor affinity. This is especially useful for large legal firms who use HighQ Collaborate as an external team collaboration tool.

Benefits of affinity HighQ Collaborate integration:

  • Simple to use client providing easy and efficient access to HighQ Collaborate repository content for users
  • Access HighQ content within a folder hierarchy in Outlook – available on and offline. Repstor affinity HighQ connector is a full offline client, providing full access, addition and editing while offline. This allows users to have full browsing capability of content in the HighQ repository both online and offline
  • Use Repstor affinity to copy or transfer documents between the HighQ repository and other existing repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint, iManage Work® or HP TRIM.
  • Add Files or Emails to HighQ Collaborate from Outlook: Users can Quick File or drag and drop content from their Windows desktop, Windows Explorer, Outlook folders, and similar applications to HighQ locations, or may choose to add documents via the affinity add document function.
  • Notification of added or updated content: Users can keep track of content within multiple repository sites. affinity will use standard unread notifications to flag new or updated content.

Request a demo of our multiple repository support to learn more…

Microsoft Outlook Integration to HP Records Manager or TRIM

Managing your HP Records Manager/TRIM content from within Outlook.

Repstor affinityTM provides all your users easy access to HP Records Manager/TRIM® content through a fast, efficient interface with Microsoft Outlook.

HP Records Manager/TRIM folders and records are presented within the folder structure of Microsoft Outlook – allowing the user to browse the hierarchy and view records within Outlook.   Users can add new records by drag and drop, or through the Repstor assist Quick File option.

Users benefit from a simple, consistent view of their Records Manager/TRIM information that allows them to add, edit and retrieve content from Records Manager/TRIM when on or offline.  Repstor affinity maintains Outlook efficiency – it is designed to provide access to HP TRIM without slowing or impacting normal Outlook use. The performance of Microsoft Outlook is not affected.

The Repstor affinity Records Manager/TRIM connector is ideally suited to scenarios where you want to provide access to Records Manager/TRIM for all your users, or you want users to access Records Manager/TRIM in combination with another content repository such as SharePoint.

Benefits of affinity Records Manager/TRIM integration:

  • Simple to use client providing efficient access to Records Manager/TRIM for all your users
  • Records Manager/TRIM folders, and records available directly within Outlook
  • Full offline client for Records Manager/TRIM content.
  • Add, edit and view documents from Records Manager/TRIM through the Outlook client (on or offline)
  • View and edit properties of Records Manager/TRIM documents (on or offline)
  • Easy filing of new records to HP Records Manager/TRIM folders with Repstor assist
  • Forward Records Manager/TRIM records and reply to emails directly from within Outlook.
  • Copy documents between the Records Manager/TRIM repository and other Repstor affinity repositories such as SharePoint

Request a demo of our multiple repository support to learn more…

Increasing Productivity, Efficiency and Effectiveness

Belfast Health and Social Care Trust delivers integrated health and social care to 340,000 people in Belfast and part of the Borough of Castlereagh. It also provides specialist services to all of Northern Ireland.

With an annual budget of approximately £1bn (spending about £3m each day) and a staff of 20,000, it is one of the largest Trusts in the United Kingdom

Motivation
With over 100 projects running in parallel the administration and filing of related communications and documentation was a major productivity drain. The process was prone to manual mistakes with content being difficult and time consuming to locate.

Challenges

  • Increasing Productivity
  • Offline Access
  • Efficiency and Effectiveness

Results

  • Time Spent Filing down 87% (replacing the previously tedious process)
  • More complete record due to ease of filing – 20% more relevant content is being filed
  • Significantly less time spent looking for Content

“Repstor’s approach is fundamentally different. In designing their affinity product, they have thought about what users expect from Outlook and what they want and need from a SharePoint system within Outlook. The product is built to minimize disruption to the user experience and encourage user adoption of SharePoint. The result is that our users are able to easily meet the PMO requirements for keeping their documentation and correspondence up to date and complete with significantly less effort and much better consistency,”

Andrew Palmer, Head of PMO, Belfast Health & Social Care Trust.

Click HERE to read the full case study. 

 

Want to know more about how Repstor can help you? Fill out the form below NOW and one of our team will be in touch with you shortly.



assist Brochure

Assisted Filing For Email And Document Content

Repstor assist™ provides filing assistance for users who need to file documents and emails into ECM systems like SharePoint. It makes filing fast and accurate by providing suggested locations based on existing filed content.

assist automatically suggests where content should be filed, removing the need for users to traverse large filing hierarchies or complete metadata forms to locate the correct filing locations for documents and emails.

Read more in our brochure. 

Want to find out what Repstor can do for you? Fill in the form below NOW:


Global Professional Services Firm Deploys Repstor ECM Adoption Software In A Highly Regulated Environment

The client is one of the largest global professional services firms providing Audit, Tax and Advisory services.

  • Part of a global network of professional services firms with around 150,000 staff working together in 150 countries worldwide
  • Needs to collaborate frequently to share knowledge and maintain productivity across their extensive and remote workforce
  • Wanted to enable co-existence of legacy ECM systems for a transition period to minimize migration pains

The German operation of this global firm operates within a highly regulated environment. The firm had a requirement to promote productivity and increase collaboration in the field while facilitating a migration and switch over to Microsoft SharePoint from legacy ECM systems.

Motivation
Given the nature of the client’s business there was a high volume of content being generated and acquired in the field. Users could be working on a variety of engagements at any one time and are often in remote client locations. They needed to be able to file content accurately and quickly whether on or offline and harvest audit content when appropriate.

The operation also had a number of legacy systems deployed to meet the needs of the individual departments which were reaching end of life and requiring significant upgrades to allow the use of the later versions of Microsoft Office which were the office tools of choice for the workforce. Facing significant upgrade costs the decision was made to deploy a single ECM platform to meet all needs across departments with SharePoint 2013 forming the core of the platform.

Challenge

  • High volumes of content being acquired in the field
  • Legacy systems, content and processes to continue to be used
  • Need to minimise change and maintain productivity
  • Frequent team collaboration on engagement content, often by remote users
  • Users spend large proportion of their time on customer sites/out of the office

Results

  • Cost avoidance: Significant cost avoidance by avoiding the need to upgrade legacy platforms to work with new Microsoft Client
  • User adoption: The client has seen the users embrace the new system in their everyday tasks. Users can access the new SharePoint repository from Microsoft Outlook and have needed no training on the system as it works exactly like Outlook folders. At the same time users have retained access to legacy content stored in the legacy ECM systems.
  • Compliance: Repstor affinity enables compliance related content to be easily captured and shared, as and when needed, on or offline.

    • Click HERE to read the full case study. 

 

Want to know more about how Repstor can help you? Fill out the form below NOW and one of our team will be in touch with you shortly.