Office of General Counsel (OGC) for the City of Jacksonville

Determined to bring order to its burgeoning content, the OGC evaluated many solutions before selecting OpenText™ eDOCS, a content management solution purpose-built for legal departments. Garrett recalled, “OpenText eDOCS had all the features that we needed. Also, one of the big selling points for us was the idea that we could effectively operate eDOCS in the cloud because we were sensitive to the amount of onsite resources that we had available.”

With the support of the OpenText Professional Services team, the firm deployed the enterprise content solution in the Microsoft^® Azure^® cloud environment, integrating with users’ familiar applications, such as Microsoft^® Office and Adobe^® Acrobat^®. The OGC also uses OpenText™ Managed Services to reduce the burden on internal IT staff and allow OpenText to handle management and maintenance of the solution. Garrett reported a smooth rollout. “The OpenText Professional Services team handled our implementation. They worked with us to get through customizing the product, making it work for our users and with all the layers that we needed for our business. They basically held our hand through the whole process.”

Centralizing content on the new platform has dramatically improved efficiency and productivity at the firm. With all content consolidated, integrated and secured in eDOCS, information is now easy to retrieve. Garrett commented on the newfound efficiency: “The big change we saw when we moved from the chaos that we had before to OpenText eDOCS was the ability to not only store everything together based on the client matter number, which was a big change and very useful for us, but it also gave us the ability to do full index searching. It has revolutionized our ability to find things.”

Document versioning allows users to find the most current version of a file. “In the past, we would have a folder in Microsoft^® Windows^® and it would have 10 or 20 different versions of a document, not always named the same thing, not always indicating that it’s a version of the same document. Now, it’s much easier for users to find what they’re looking for and to see the progress of the document and who’s touched it and why,” Garrett reported.

Garrett noted that user response has also been positive. “The general feedback has been good. We have users that love it and really appreciate all the benefits.”

The OGC has also benefited from the cloud-based deployment of eDOCS in the Azure cloud, which has delivered improved performance, stability, redundancy and ease of management. “One of the real advantages that we have with OpenText and the Azure cloud is that we have a lot of flexibility, not only in the type of servers that we’re using, but also with the space. Now, we have so much more flexibility with that, with storage and with the configuration of our system,” said Garrett.

With OpenText Managed Services, the OGC can rest assured that the new document management solution will not overburden its limited IT resources with maintenance responsibilities. The firm can take advantage of the benefits of the solution without the responsibility of managing it, including upgrades. “We’ve had an easy time transitioning as we upgrade or make changes. Upgrading and having the latest technology is definitely helpful, not only for the user experience but also for compatibility with other applications. It’s been really helpful and pretty seamless,” Garrett concluded.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Garrett and are not sponsored or approved by the City of Jacksonville, the Office of General Counsel, or any other agency or unit of the City’s government. Mr. Garrett was not compensated for this interview.