Oil and gas company gains control and peace of mind

Regaining control

An oil and gas exploration and production company headquartered in Australia needed an electronic document and records management system (EDRMS). The organization operates in a heavily regulated environment and needed to gain control over its information. All information was kept indefinitely, and this was creating problems as the company grew rapidly. The organization found that people were keeping a lot of information on local drives which led to problems with security, consistency, and knowing which information was current. The staff struggled to find information, and duplication on the file share was out of control. The organization decided to use SharePoint 2013 for document management, but needed more robust records management functionality to meet compliance needs.

The organization compared several SharePoint records management products and decided that RecordPoint for SharePoint met the requirements and was the most user-friendly records management tool, as it hid the record functions from end users, allowing SharePoint to be configured to meet the needs of the business. Requirements included physical records management, support for both SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online, and a support desk in the region. RecordPoint met all of these requirements and more through its global service desk, physical records management capabilities, and hybrid capabilities.

SharePoint 2013 and RecordPoint for SharePoint is the organization’s official system of record. Other line of business applications are used throughout the business, but those are managed by the department and records are sent to SharePoint/RecordPoint as needed.

RecordPoint met all of these requirements and more through its global service desk, physical records management capabilities, and hybrid capabilities.

Implementation success

This organization used a practical approach to the implementation of RecordPoint that would work well for other companies. First, files were scanned the organization’s file shares to understand where documents were located, their age, and to inform content categorization. Second, the company planned and built the SharePoint infrastructure and took RecordPoint’s automated rules engine into account when designing the information architecture. The organization used SharePoint content types and managed metadata to drive consistency across sites. Next, it implemented RecordPoint and configured the automatic classification rules. Finally, all documents were processed to apply a classification and retention schedule.

Benefiting the business

The biggest benefit to using RecordPoint is that the end users don’t know it is there. They don’t have to manually classify records or move records to a different system. When they perform their daily work, all their content is managed appropriately but automatically—users don’t have to think about it.

RecordPoint is also easy for records managers to use. They log into a single RecordPoint dashboard that displays all records information, and can easily see unclassified content across all content sources, manage physical records requests, and perform bulk sentencing and disposal actions.

Most importantly, RecordPoint provides peace of mind. The organization is no longer worried that keeping data forever that will expose them to an e-discovery or litigation risk. It also isn’t concerned that content won’t be classified properly or that it will be deleted prematurely.

Most importantly, RecordPoint provides peace of mind.

Looking to the future

The organization has a few goals for the future of its records management program. First, it is going through a merger. There is work to bring the acquired company’s documents into RecordPoint to be managed properly, and work to migrate content as needed.

Next, the organization would like to manage more content sources, such as those in line of business applications and a hybrid SharePoint environment, including Office 365 content within RecordPoint.