WaterNSW and the FYB team received the Micro Focus Outstanding Innovation Award 2021 at the Information Management & Governance Forum 2021 for the implementation of Teams2CM Collaborate.

WaterNSW supply and seek to improve availability of water that is essential for water users and the communities throughout NSW. With more than 40 dams across the state, WaterNSW supply two-thirds of water used in NSW to regional towns, irrigators, Sydney Water Corporation and local water utilities.

WaterNSW needed a solution to capture information from Microsoft Teams to Content Manager, to meet compliance obligations. Once hearing about Teams2CM Collaborate and its ability to allow users to work from Microsoft Teams to access, update and collaborate on Content Manager information it was implemented for 1,192 Content Manager Users.

Jo Smith, Records Application Lead, WaterNSW, said “We had started implementing Teams and other Microsoft collaboration tools (SharePoint and OneDrive) within our business prior to COVID hitting, so we had begun to see a little bit of impact on the way users were operating. But when our whole organisation moved to working from home we all of a sudden got this high uptake especially of Microsoft Teams

“Straight away we had people using the Teams space to collaborate on documents. It has fundamentally changed the way Water NSW works and will continue to do so into the future.

“Before COVID hit we were already looking at options for how we could capture the documents stored in Teams. We were very conscious that people would start capturing documents in that space. As records managers we were already thinking about how we would transition those documents from Teams to our record-keeping system which is Content Manager.

“We have compliance obligations under the legislation so we didn’t want things just sitting forever in the Teams space we wanted to use Teams as a collaboration environment but have the documents transition to our EDRMS where they could be better controlled and managed,” said Smith.

Some of the challenges included:

• Users storing documents in Microsoft Teams with no easy option to archive items from Teams to Content Manager
• Ability to update documents in Teams and sync changes so they were automatically available in Content Manager
• Users wanted to expose Content Manager documents into a Teams Channel
• Capacity to workflow documents from Teams environment and have those workflows and approvals captured in Content Manager seamlessly

FYB Teams2CM Collaborate has provided WaterNSW with the following key capabilities and features:

• Provided the first steps in their digital evolution for Content Manager by integrating and capturing information from Microsoft Teams
• Assisting with the capture and management of records to meet compliance obligations
• Utilise Microsoft Teams to communicate and collaborate supported by Teams2CM Collaborate to archive documents

Using FYB Teams2CM Collaborate has provided WaterNSW with the ability to:

• Search across Teams and CM
• Reduced administration time
• Increased uptake for documents to be captured in Content Manager, meeting its compliance obligations
• Enabled expansion of collaboration technology options to work on documents supported by Teams2CM Collaborate sync and archive functions
• Apply and update CM workflows from Teams

All of the sessions at Micro Focus IM&G Forum 2021, including the presentation from Jo Smith, Records Application Lead, WaterNSW, are available to View On-Demand HERE