Managing HR Documents in SharePoint

Background and challenges:

Our client is a global specialty health science company that provides market-leading products used for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. They are a leading provider of medical isotopes, targeted therapies and sterilization technologies that benefit the lives of millions of people in more than 60 countries around the world. As with many corporations, they were concerned with their information management and ensuring that critical and confidential human resources information was quickly accessible and only available to the right people. Challenges included:

• Control over HR Documents. They needed hands on control over the release of documents and the ability to update said documents without third party intervention.
• Usage Policies & Governance. They required unbridled control over system access, user access profiles and the ability to govern and monitor such access.
• Security. Due to the sensitive nature of the information, system security was critical.
• Perceived Risks. SharePoint infrastructure expertise was limited. Furthermore, they wished to have the ability to migrate the existing voluminous documents on mass without error prone manual processes while maintaining existing taxonomy and metadata.

Leveraging SharePoint to address information management concerns:

The SharePoint solution we deployed included the following features, and more:

• Auditing of document access – detailed history of document access by user.
• Document Versioning with Check in/out breakdown.
• File size and document type restrictions.
• Recycle Bin document recovery [recover accidental document deletions].
• Document Search and Retrieval capabilities.
• Anti virus checking for every document added or removed from SharePoint.
• Backup / Restore of farm and disaster Recovery Planning and testing.

The benefits:

The SharePoint solution minimizes maintenance considerations but provides a high degree of protection, security and scalability. The fact that data backups are now performed by internal SQL management ensures direct compliance with internal policies and procedures. The HR Department was now in position to start using SharePoint WorkFlow
into their document approval process allowing them to have:

• Enhanced Security and integration with existing Active Directory. The owners of the information now have sole access control and can manage the data eliminating IT personnel from the process.
• Better control of Data Recovery processes and adherence to internal anti-virus policies and data security.
• More freedom to use features inherent to SharePoint such as WorkFlow management with ability to introduce onboarding/offboarding solutions to the HR department processess.
• Faster and more accurate search results of HR Documents.
• Full control of metadata and taxonomy with enforcement of required metadata (ex: every document now must have a “subject” and “created by” information).Enhanced Security and integration with existing Active Directory. The owners of the information now have sole access control and can manage the data eliminating IT personnel from the process.
• Better control of Data Recovery processes and adherence to internal anti-virus policies and data security.
• More freedom to use features inherent to SharePoint such as WorkFlow management with ability to introduce onboarding/offboarding solutions to the HR department processess.
• Faster and more accurate search results of HR Documents.
• Full control of metadata and taxonomy with enforcement of required metadata (ex: every document now must have a “subject” and “created by” information).