Swansea Improves Document Management With Open Source ECM

As a fast moving organization specializing in property management and real estate development, Swansea Housing Association knew it needed a new system for managing content. The Association develops and manages over $200 million in property and real estate and works with planners, architects, and public administration officials over the course of several projects. As you can expect, Swansea generates an overwhelming amount of documentation.

As documents made their way through their various stages of the lifecycle (from draft to reviewed to approved to archived), employees and those outside the company collaborated on and shared these documents via unsecured email. However, due to the difficulty in managing and manually tracking these documents, Swansea employees often found they had the incorrect version of a document or the discussions and decisions associated with an earlier version had been deleted or lost.

Swansea Housing Association's other problem revolved around their existing collaborative platform – Lotus Notes – which provided a cumbersome and limiting environment for defining workflows that facilitated the lifecycle management of the documents. A workflow stipulates how the document proceeds through its lifecycle and who has authority to review, change, and approve it.

For Swansea, Lotus Notes allowed only two types of users, "administrators" and "authors," significantly limiting their ability to collaborate and securely control access. Moreover, to change a workflow meant they had to call in an outside programmer, an expensive and time-consuming procedure. And, for each new project, Swansea essentially had to start over from scratch because Notes did not allow them to reuse configurations from earlier projects.