From Storage Limits, to Sky is the Limit

Integration between Worktribe and a SharePoint Document Management System has greatly enhanced how the Research Contracts Governance and Integrity team manage their work.

The Research Contracts Governance and Integrity (RCGI) team draft and review over 2,000 contracts each year related to University research projects. The file matters for each of  [AS1] these contracts are created in the contracts module in Worktribe, a cloud-based research management platform used by the University.

To prepare and draft contracts, the team require a secure Document Management System location to store vast email trails and accompanying documentation which needs to be accessible to multiple users within RCGI.   

Originally the RCGI worked with an extensive number of subfolders in a communal Outlook email account to store this content, duplicating items into corresponding folders in a communal drive. This manual method was labour-intensive, vulnerable to error through duplication and was hindered by the limited by storage capacity of Outlook and the shared drive.   

With the ISG Project Management Office, developers from the Applications Directorate worked to resolve this problem by using the API manager WSO2 - linking Worktribe to a collaborative SharePoint site dedicated to the RCGI team.   

The SharePoint Solutions team gathered information on the requirements of the RCGI team in order to make the production of research contracts more efficient - designing a solution that automates the process of file creation and closure. Colleagues in Development Services worked to build and deploy this process using an API connection (WSO2) between Worktribe and SharePoint. 

Now, for all contract matters created in Worktribe a corresponding contract file is opened in SharePoint, allowing RCGI to manage the documentation from this user-friendly platform.  Each file has a unique contract number and a standardised folder structure.   

Another issue RCGI faced was managing their email records and with the addition of third-party management tool Harmon.ie. Now that all documentation relating to a contract is stored in SharePoint, RCGI staff are now able to view and manage their files from the Outlook interface as preferred by the team.