The Challenge
As a public sector organisation, HBRC has a number of
statutory obligations around record keeping and web standards. Systems
that manage documents and website content were becoming outdated and
were long overdue for replacement. The HBRC website was meeting some web
standards, but not all, and was rapidly slipping down the national
rankings for local authority websites. The HBRC document management
system was also old and cumbersome, thus not meeting the needs of
business users around usability, and find-ability of records and was
also inadequate for today’s statutory obligations for record keeping.
To advance and meet statutory obligations and
business users’ needs, HBRC decided that SharePoint 2010 was the perfect
platform upon which to build new website, extranet, intranet, and
document management systems. To ensure the most ‘fit for purpose’
solution was delivered, HBRC engaged two separate consulting agencies:
one for the organisation’s website and extranet and one for the intranet
and document management system. “SharePoint is a platform that seems to
have come of age, and thankfully we had industry leading vendors who
specialised in this functionality to partner with HBRC to make it all
happen,” said Rob Simpson, Systems Engineer at HBRC. “It was clear that
Microsoft would be supporting SharePoint for a long time to come.”
To achieve this functionality, HBRC worked with the
agencies to build four SharePoint farms. The organisation’s website and
extranet, which is accessed by several hundred unique visitors each day,
holds approximately 4 gigabytes (GB) of data. The intranet and document
management system, which is accessed by approximately 150 employees,
holds another 2 GB of data at present, but will soon hold approximately
two terabytes of data when file share content is fully migrated.
With critical data for both internal and external purposes living
in SharePoint, HBRC needed to ensure data was backed up according to
organisational needs and easily recoverable. “We were concerned about
the fact that SharePoint required us to recover our entire database if
documents were lost or deleted by end users,” Simpson said. “Based on
our experience recovering email systems requiring their entire
databases, we estimated this could take us as long as two days to
accomplish.”