Extending Etrieve Across Campus
Institutional Advancement’s success and satisfaction with the Etrieve platform caught the eye of the institution’s CIO amidst frustrations with ImageNow, the digital content repository for a handful of other departments. Due to a continued decline in the quality and consistency of ImageNow customer support, the institution chose to further their relationship with Softdocs, pivoting these remaining departments from ImageNow to Etrieve.
“We had been with ImageNow since 2008 in our Registrar’s office, Student Financial Services, and admissions. During that time ImageNow was acquired several different times, and with each iteration, we felt the support diminish,” said Cross. “Especially compared to Softdocs support, which is out of this world.”
Having utilized ImageNow for over a decade, Saint Michael’s College had hundreds of thousands of documents to migrate.
The Softdocs Professional Services team worked closely with Cross, holding regularly scheduled meetings to review system best practices and any additional functionality Saint Michael’s College wanted to introduce with the system migration—including document type additions, granular security settings, and import lookups.
Tasked with leading the migration, Cross began setting up required document types within Etrieve and tracking his progress. Having assembled a core team (one person from each office), Saint Michael’s College hosted sessions to ensure each department approved the direction of the work being done. “This migration was an opportunity for us to clear up our data, addressing and refiling documents that were incomplete or misfiled,” said Cross. “It was a great chance to clean house, streamline processes, and make things easier to find.”
While the institution leveraged several different email document types in ImageNow, they simplified to just one type per office. And with the intuitive nature of Etrieve’s web-based user interface, end users took to the new system like ducks to water. New hires had ready access to any information needed to complete their tasks. If employees got a new computer or device, Etrieve was already there—without having to be installed.
“Our end users love the fact that if they need something new—an import or a document type—well, we know how to get that done for them. Our previous system was a black box for us. It would take weeks to get something really simple done,” said Cross.