Tennessee Housing

“We needed to reduce our paper footprint, not only to create space, but also to provide for a more secure way to store important work documents that might be damaged and permanently lost in a fire, flood, or other natural disaster,” says Nicole Lucas, Director of Information Technology for the agency. “We also recognized that by taking paper documents from filing cabinets, digitizing them, and then moving the documents into an electronic repository, our essential and business critical work documents could be accessed from anywhere in the event that the agency’s work locations were compromised or temporarily unavailable.”

THDA decided to develop a centralized scanning process that would allow for consistent and controlled storage of all agency documents. Individual departments had developed their own standards for identifying and storing documents, but these processes needed to be revised in order to create a truly unified and centralized enterprise content management (ECM) solution that could operate within the organization’s existing Microsoft SharePoint intranet.

THDA officials visited the Kentucky Housing Corporation in the state next door to view how they managed their electronic documentation, and decided to use the same solution: KnowledgeLake ECM products running on SharePoint.

“After viewing the Kentucky Housing Corporation solution, we saw that using KnowledgeLake would be our best option because only minimal modifications would be needed to integrate it with our existing SharePoint system,” says Crystal Canaday, THDA’s Electronic Content Specialist. “It also made sense from a systems integration standpoint. It would be easier for our existing housing application software vendors to integrate with SharePoint’s repository than with other ECM providers such as Filenet.”

The THDA deployed a number of KnowledgeLake products, including KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint, KnowledgeLake Capture for SharePoint, and KnowledgeLake Connect for SharePoint. These products combined provide a broad range of functions, including the ability to view, annotate, and search for documents; perform batch scanning of paper documents; and upload and access electronic documents directly from common business applications like Microsoft Office. The agency uses Fujitsu fi-6800 series scanners, which are high-volume, color duplex-capable devices.

Each division in the agency is responsible for preparing all files— including populating documents with bar codes embedded with metadata—prior to sending them to the THDA ECM team. The ECM team then reviews each document before scanning, indexing, and releasing each document to SharePoint.