CWC paper records transferred to new SharePoint system
Parabola Software have developed a solution for City of Westminster College to remove a mountain of archived paper records, replacing them with documents stored in SharePoint 2010 where they can be quickly accessed using SharePoint Search. The solution utilises BDC (Business Data Catalogue) and a connector from the eCopy scanning system developed in partnership with Paper River.
The requirement to keep student letters and completed forms for up to 5 years after the student finishes their course creates a physical storage problem for many colleges. For the City of Westminster College this problem became critical as they prepared to consolidate three old buildings into a single, new building in Paddington Wharf. There is simply no room in the new building for all the records in storage, let alone any new ones.
The college strategy is to use SharePoint for document management but this left the problem of how to scan and store the documents in a way which then allowed them to be easily retrieved. Parabola solved this problem by integrating the scanner software with UNIT-e.
The solution enables CWC to use the scanner interface to select the relevant student from UNIT-e, saving the scanned copy directly into SharePoint. Any single Student ID or Student Name search in SharePoint now returns all documents relating to the student, regardless of the document type.
Using the scanner to select the student ensures the time needed to load each document into SharePoint is minimised. As CWC move into their new building this month, they are delighted to have avoided the need to relocate several tonnes of old paper.