Developing a Complete Enterprise Content Management Strategy
Through robust integrations between Ellucian Colleague®, Etrieve and other admin systems, the University was taking significant steps toward standardizing data collection, management and distribution processes across campus. In fact, they created and implemented almost 50 Etrieve e-forms within the first 18 months alone.
However, the University was still maintaining ImageNow, for content management, and were growing increasingly frustrated with its Java requirements. They recognized an opportunity to improve upon their overall content management strategy.
“We had to decide whether we wanted to upgrade our document management system to a new, non-Java dependent version of our current system or embrace Etrieve Content, which would also allow us to transition to ECM in the cloud,” said JoAnne Bodine, lead application programmer analyst.
Their decision to deploy cloud-based Etrieve Content, released Shenandoah’s information technology department from having to host and maintain an ECM solution, and enhanced the handoff between electronic forms, workflow and the institution’s back-end document storage system. They also gained a content management interface that end users found much easier and freed up resources typically expended on time-intensive nightly OS updates.
Due to its high volume of content, Shenandoah chose to implement Etrieve Content in the Office of Admissions first, supported by Softdocs’ professional services team. Following the success of this deployment, the University chose to expand their Etrieve Content adoption by self implementing in other departments.
Tamara Lapp, software workflow documentation analyst at Shenandoah, explained, “Following Discovery and Training, our team really understood how to efficiently expand our deployment to additional departments. We learned exactly what we needed to do to get all of our departments using Etrieve Content, while Softdocs focused on migrating documents.”
With many departments at Shenandoah University now live with the entire Etrieve platform, end users are buying-in and recognizing how new features can be utilized to improve their day-to-day.
“It took our users less than a day to fully understand how things can be done through Etrieve Content. From creating bookmarks for searches to itemizing items specifically for their needs, our users are embracing every benefit, while saying only great things about the ease of use,” Bodine said.
"Etrieve Content works better for our users, and they know it."