Law Firm Gains Single View of Enterprise Content with Open Text

23 August 2010

Open Text eDOCS Integration for Microsoft® SharePoint® by SeeUnity Inc. Consolidates SharePoint Content into Centralized System

Open Text Corporation, the preeminent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, today announced that Stikeman Elliott, recognized nationally and internationally for the sophistication of its business law practice in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver, has selected Open Text s eDOCS Integration for Microsoft® SharePoint® by SeeUnity Inc. (an Open Text OEM partner). The Open Text solution enables the firm to capture documents created in SharePoint so they can be centrally managed in accordance with regulatory and business requirements.

The announcement was made at the ILTA 2010 conference taking place this week at Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Open Text is a platinum sponsor of the event and exhibiting in booths 713 & 715.

Stikeman Elliott began using Open Text technology in the 1990s when the firm selected Open Text Document Management, eDOCS Edition (eDOCS DM), and in 2001 its corporate intranet, STELLA, was created. Although the firm had been satisfied with the Open Text portal application for many years, Stikeman Elliott decided to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for its intranet solution. The firm relies extensively on Microsoft® technologies and SharePoint integrates seamlessly into its existing IT infrastructure. As a result, the firm needed to be able to integrate its Open Text eDOCS DM system with SharePoint and selected Open Text eDOCS Integration for Microsoft® SharePoint® to do the job.

"We decided that the best approach would be to leave Open Text eDOCS DM in the back-end and let it continue to do the job that it does so well, which is managing the documents, security, version control, etc., and then expose the documents in collaborative workspaces in the SharePoint front-end," said Venky Srinivasan, Director, Technology at Stikeman Elliott. STELLA, now on the SharePoint platform, can bring together information from the various different systems, whether it's eDOCS DM, InterAction, or ADERANT. "We don't replicate any data that already exists in one system. We just extract it and display it in SharePoint."

With the Open Text solution, end-users don't need to worry about where their documents are stored. Entering through the SharePoint front-end, users can work on whatever they want, and wherever they go, the appropriate documents will be in the system for them to work on. This could be related to a matter or to any other type of team site that the firm is building for a non-lawyer department. For example, a team site was built for the firm s marketing department, while another one was built for its student and associate programs. All content associated with those two sites is managed by eDOCS DM in the back-end. The IT team can control the interface entirely by building a customizable front-end interface based on user needs.

Open Text eDOCS Integration for SharePoint covers all aspects of the integration with a consistent, easy-to-deploy architecture. Once content is uploaded, users have full use of all the SharePoint collaboration features and synchronization of all changes back to the eDOCS repositories to insure that the content is managed appropriately. This way, version control and security of the document can be maintained in eDOCS and users can be assured they have a single version of the truth' across multiple departments, workgroups or team sites. eDOCS also provides an audit trail of the lifecycle of the document including who worked on the document and when.

"Like so many law firms around the world, Stikeman Elliott s information and knowledge management path is an on-going process and the firm needs to adopt the technologies that make the most sense for its business," said Todd Partridge, General Manager eDOCS and Legal Solutions for Open Text. "Open Text eDOCS Integration for Microsoft® SharePoint® has enabled the firm to efficiently consolidate, not only its SharePoint content, but all other content within the firm into one, secure centralized system helping to streamline business processes."

For more information on Stikeman Elliott s integration, read the full customer success story here.