Customer
City of Brampton
Summary
Home to Canada’s ninth largest city, the City of Brampton’s (Ontario) content and records management solutions were no longer meeting the growing requirements for compliance and governance. The affects were felt by the City’s employees, who tried to optimize their outdated solution as best as they could.
It became clear that the City had to make their way through a digital transformation. While this is a common scenario today, their circumstances were anything but. The City handled two substantial projects in quick succession—one being an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online, the second being the implementation of an electronic document and records management system.
Challenge
To jumpstart the digital transformation, the City needed to make the move to the cloud. In addition, the City also needed a more substantial document management system that would work on top of their SharePoint environment. The records management team at the City had utilized their SharePoint 2007 instance for some management, but ultimately relied on physical records to keep track of documents. The information management team also got involved and teamed up with the records management team to evaluate governance and compliance processes. It became obvious that there were gaps in their policies. While all of this was going on, the City was also in the midst of numerous personnel changes that saw managers come and go in short succession.
Strategy
To migrate their existing files to SharePoint Online and implement the complementing records management solution, the City chose to work with Gimmal. With their records management and governance solutions, Gimmal was the best choice for the City’s information management needs. The City’s vision for a comprehensive records management and content governance solution aligned closely with Gimmal’s software capabilities and expertise.
Gimmal was able to deliver on the City’s records and information management needs with their software solutions that work on top of SharePoint. As they City transitioned to SharePoint Online, Gimmal was able to implement their content governance software to run on top of it. The SharePoint architecture served as a great place to implement the governance and records management solutions. These business-critical solutions became the foundation for the City’s personalized ECM system called BRiMS (Brampton Records and information Management System). With the solution in place, the City was able to gain more control over their information across all departments. Gimmal was able to support the launch of BRiMS, providing training and knowledge transfer to the City’s employees.
Results
With BRiMS architected and implemented for organization-wide information management, the City was set with a specific solution that was made for their exact needs. During the migration, more than two million documents were successfully moved from SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online. This also included moving 3,500 users to Office 365, running on Azure. With accessibility to SharePoint Online, teams are now able to work with their mobile devices. Gimmal’s records management and governance solutions have made it easier for the City’s employees to find what they need. With Gimmal solutions, content types and metadata are assigned the moment they are uploaded. Team intranet sites were also created by the City, and the structure set forth by Gimmal’s software helps to keep the sites organized and easy to find. Employee adoption was high, helped along by the familiar SharePoint interface and the tight integration with Gimmal.
The City set out to complete these projects to future proof their operations, as well as enable innovation through the organization. After the projects were complete, the City felt poised to provide the best service possible to the people of Brampton.
