Georgia Municipal Association Selects Hummingbird Enterprise To Improve Access To Information And Ensure Business Continuity
Hummingbird Ltd., a leading global provider of integrated enterprise content management (ECM) and network connectivity solutions today announced that the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA) has selected Hummingbird Enterprise for its content management system to provide staff with improved access to documents and records and to implement a holistic business resilience and disaster recovery solution to protect its data, knowledge assets, and business content.
Created in 1934, GMA is the only state organization that represents municipal governments in Georgia. It is a voluntary, non-profit organization that provides legislative advocacy, educational, employee benefit and technical consulting services to its members which currently totals more than 500 municipal governments, accounting for more than 99% of the state's municipal population.
Hummingbird Enterprise will provide GMA with a central repository for managing content lifecycle including paper, electronic documents and e-mail. The new solution will replace the previous practice of storing and sharing documents across several different directories. Content to be managed and stored include life insurance eligibility forms, retirement forms, contracts with third party vendors and other cities, and standard financial documents.
"We have a lot of paper in the building and realized that we needed to digitize this information because if we were ever to have a serious incident such as a fire or even a grievous act which could prevent us from continuing normal operations, all our documentation would be lost," said John Restivo, Director, IT at the Georgia Municipal Association. "It is critical to have an information infrastructure that is always accessible rather than having to recover from a business stoppage. Hummingbird Enterprise will provide us with a proven, solid foundation to build a functionally-rich content management environment with full disaster recovery."
The Association will use the industry-leading document management and imaging capabilities of Hummingbird Enterprise to address several initiatives, beginning with scanning and indexing a broad range of documents currently stored in filing cabinets, into the secure content repository of Hummingbird Enterprise. If the primary system is not available for any reason, staff will have access to a synchronized offsite backup system that is part of GMA's disaster recovery environment.
Hummingbird Enterprise will offer staff multiple user interfaces to interact with the document management system, including Windows Explorer, Microsoft Outlook and a Web browser-based interface.
The secure search, retrieval and backup capabilities of Hummingbird Enterprise will enable GMA staff to better manage and access electronic content. With easier access to public documents and records, staff will be able to respond quicker to information requests, improving overall efficiencies and improving the disaster preparedness position of the Association.
Furthermore, with the automated e-mail management capabilities of Hummingbird Enterprise, GMA will be able to classify e-mail based on pre- determined rules. The system offers an advanced, automated means to capture, process, and classify e-mail to more effectively manage e-mails and attachments. This means that GMA staff will be able to archive whatever e-mail is pertinent and easily enable users to search and discover e-mail in the archive.
"Organizations today are faced with a number of business challenges around compliance and legislation, disaster recovery planning, and the overall ability to improve internal processes," said Andrew Pery, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Hummingbird Ltd. "The Georgia Municipal Association understands the importance of protecting its documents and records from the risks associated with the loss of intellectual assets. With Hummingbird Enterprise, GMA will have a robust content management infrastructure which will empower its staff to securely and effectively store, manage, and share information across departments, resulting in improved efficiencies and reduced risk."
About Hummingbird Enterprise
Hummingbird Enterprise provides an integrated platform for enterprise content management that provides global organizations with solutions to manage business interaction information such as documents, records, virtual deal room exchanges, discussions, e-mail or financial data - linking business processes, information and people. Hummingbird solutions are designed as modular applications that are fully interoperable with each other, enabling customers to incrementally build an enterprise content management solution to meet their evolving information needs in a cost effective manner.
About Hummingbird
Hummingbird Ltd. (NASDAQ:HUMC) (NASDAQ:TSX:) (NASDAQ:HUM) is a leading global provider of enterprise software solutions. The Company's enterprise software solutions fall into two principal categories: enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, and network connectivity solutions. Hummingbird's ECM solutions enable organizations to manage the lifecycle of enterprise content from creation to disposition, thereby enabling organizations to address critical business needs, such as information management, business continuity, compliance and risk mitigation. The network connectivity solutions provide a comprehensive set of core network technologies that enables the enterprise to connect to any type of legacy system.
Founded in 1984, Hummingbird employs over 1,400 people and serves more than 33,000 customers, including 90% of Fortune 100. Hummingbird solutions are sold directly from 40 offices worldwide and through an Alliance Network of partners and resellers. For more information, visit www.hummingbird.com.