Case Study - Sharepoint and Groove in Solicitors

Challenge

A challenge for all service industries is to provide a "local" service whilst simultaneously delivering deep, and expensive, expertise. A common solution to this problem is to have local offices where clients can be met and business transacted, supported by centralised teams of subject matter experts that can be called on by the local offices. This approach has been used by the banking industry for years and it is also used by firms of solicitors.

A consequence of this business model is the increased communication flows between the various offices and the need to share information and documents in a secure manner amongst a team of people working on a customer issue when those people are distributed across multiple physical offices; or even time zones.

Our client, a regional firm of solicitors with offices in the East and South East of England, had the problem of co-ordinating access to shared case documents. They commonly experienced situations where multiple copies of a case document existed because team members were mobile and were using laptops. This created the resulting challenges of ensuring all copies contained the same information; that team members were only ever using the latest versions of documents; and there was a reduced chance that two people could make changes to the same document at the same time and one set of changes would be lost.

Solution

After analysing the environment and the problem, our proposed solution involved using two products from Microsoft: Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 and Microsoft Office Groove 2007.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 [MOSS]

delivers a centralised Document Management System [DMS] to hold all published versions of case documents and acts as the central repository for all company documents. Version control is enabled so that the evolution of documents is captured and the various Document Libraries are integrated into Microsoft Office Word (the firm's chosen word processing package) so that documents can be checked in and out directly from Word.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007

is installed on all workstations and laptops and delivers a environment in which information can be synchronised across multiple computers securely and efficiently without the user having to do anything. It is used to synchronise the contents of Document Libraries across the laptops of mobile team members and to deliver a collaborative authoring environment for use during case development.

Each new case results in the creation of a distinct Groove Workspace to which team members are invited. The Groove workspace is used to coordinate the activities of the team, act as a general repository for shared information and provide a collaborative document authoring and editing space. Once documents are agreed, the approved version is automatically submitted into the DMS. If a document needs to be revised, a copy is checked out of the DMS into the Groove workspace and the process repeats itself.

Benefits

After running a successful trial the main conclusions were:

1. Team members (many of them highly paid solicitors) saved a considerable amount of otherwise lost time because of the automatic synchronisation offered by Groove and because they always had up to date versions of documents on their laptops. This in turn reduced one of the major stumbling blocks to getting Solicitors to adopt new ways of working.
2. Support staff saved time because they spent less time looking for mis-placed documents or restoring documents that were inadvertently deleted from the previous shared drive based filing system.
3. The built in security offered by Groove resulted in a considerable reduction of the risk of data loss or disclosure in the event of a laptop being lost of stolen.
4. The centralised administration and automatic deployment, and removal, of workspaces offered by Groove reduced the time taken to join people into a team and ensured the secure removal of leaving members, including removing the case documents from their laptops.

Further Opportunities

Active consideration is now being given to extending the use of Groove to allow external collaborators, such as Barristers and technical experts to have partial controlled access to a case's workspace to improve cross organisational collaboration.