US Municipal Government Drives Cost Savings By Centralizing File Shares, SharePoint and Paper Records

US Municipal Background

·       Population: ~118,214 residents

·       Area Served: 18.4 km²

·       Employees: 5,000

Providing Public Safety, Public Works, Community Development, Education, Libraries, Cultural Services, Social Services and Regulatory Functions

The Challenge

A US municipal government, established in the early 1600s, recognized that its document and records management processes had become fragmented over time. Each department had evolved independently, maintaining a mix of physical records and digital documents across file shares and SharePoint. Without a unified structure, various strategies were implemented, resulting in growing repositories that were increasingly difficult to manage at scale. To address this challenge, the municipality sought a strategy to consolidate these repositories and establish a common structure across the entire organization.

Project Objectives

• Apply consistent design principles across all departments.
• Consolidate all repositories into a single Microsoft-hosted platform.
• Classify, label, and enforce policies on records subject to legislative requirements.
• Control rising storage costs through strategic archiving and disposition.
• Integrate document management workflows with core business systems.
• Reduce support demands on already stretched internal IT teams.

Delivery Strategy

The municipality faced decades of accumulated data across 10 departments, spanning multiple repositories and over 300 document types. To ensure success, the project was divided into clear, manageable stages.

Departments were prioritized based on complexity and urgency, starting with those holding large volumes of paper records, which were driving up storage and scanning costs.

Each department operated as an independent workstream with three key quality checkpoints:

• Solution design and migration strategy – aligning all stakeholders, including external scanning vendors.
• Filer deployment, testing, and approval – validating the solution before migration or scanning.
• Pilot migration/scanning batch – demonstrating the full end-to-end process.

Filer Solution

Flexible Search
Context-driven search tailored to each department and integrated with their primary business systems enabled rapid information retrieval. Consistent metadata ensured secure and versatile search options.

Filer IDP (Intelligent Document Processing)
Filer delivered an end-to-end scanning solution, capturing metadata at the point of scan and leveraging lookups from existing systems. Exceptions were handled through intuitive human-assisted workflows or reclassification using Microsoft AI models.

Filer Migration Tool
Highly flexible migration tooling connected natively with the Filer API, enabling reconstruction of folder-based structures from file shares and fragmented SharePoint sites. This ensured all digital documents were accurately filed in Filer.

Inherited Metadata, Permissions, and Policies
To address inconsistent metadata quality, documents inherited metadata during migration or scanning. Classification by context and type allowed Filer to automatically apply metadata, permissions, and retention policies.

Document Editing & Redaction
Users could edit, collaborate, and redact documents directly within Microsoft 365, eliminating reliance on third-party tools and saving time.

Power Platform & Copilot Integration
The structured, organized repositories created an AI-ready foundation, enabling future automation and advanced AI initiatives.

Key Benefits

• Eliminated legacy repositories, reducing risk and cost.
• Improved information accessibility for users.
• Delivered significant time efficiencies across departments.
• Achieved direct cost savings by reducing storage expenses.
• Established a critical foundation for AI and LLM technologies.
• Preserved physical records vulnerable to loss or damage.

“We faced a major challenge with an intimidating scale. Filer streamlined the effort, cutting risk and complexity to keep the project on track”

– Portfolio Project Manager