Professional services

London law firm runs SharePoint DMS

3 February 2011

Law firm Winckworth Sherwood has replaced its legacy document management solution (DMS) with a customised Microsoft SharePoint DMS.

The London-based company selected ClearPeople to deploy the new solution in its Private Client Department in mid-2010 before beginning a company-wide rollout in January 2011.

Our work with Winckworth Sherwood demonstrates that SharePoint can be used as a powerful DMS – it is a real alternative to a traditional standalone DMS

Gabriel Karawani, ClearPeople Christel Aguila, head of IT at Winckworth Sherwood, said: “The capabilities of our bespoke DMS, which we had been using for the past 12 years, were being stretched, especially when creating and sharing different file types; this was affecting the productivity of both fee earners and support staff. We required a more flexible DMS with strong e-mail handling capabilities and the ability to manage different electronic file types.”

The new SharePoint DMS stores, shares and manages the law firm’s growing volume and variety of electronic document types including email, drawings, plans and PDF files.

The solution offers a tight and intuitive integration into Outlook enabling drag-and-drop of emails, attachments and files from the file system.

“Using a SharePoint-based DMS has already started to reduce IT management and annual maintenance costs; had we selected an alternative legal-sector DMS product those costs would have been much higher”, Aguila added.

Gabriel Karawani, who heads up ClearPeople’s business solutions team, concluded: “Our work with Winckworth Sherwood demonstrates that SharePoint can be used as a powerful DMS ̶ it is a real alternative to a traditional standalone DMS. With enhanced document management and collaboration through Outlook and the search facilities we customised within Microsoft Office and SharePoint, using MacroView DMF, Winckworth Sherwood’s staff can now find and access documents far quicker than before.”

Add a comment