London, 15 December 2015
Leading ECM Adoption specialist, Repstor, today announced that Natural Resources Wales, has deployed Repstor affinity, to enable users across their widely dispersed Office 365 deployment to meet regulatory needs for records management and compliance.
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) is the largest Welsh Government Sponsored Body – employing 1,900 staff across Wales with a budget of £180 million. It was formed in April 2013, largely taking over the functions of the Countryside Council for Wales, Forestry Commission Wales and the Environment Agency in Wales, as well as certain Welsh Government functions.
One of the key commitments for NRW, and in keeping with Central Government strategies, was to deliver secure, accessible, effective, easy to use, online services to its customers. Where possible, and appropriate, NRW has committed to using cloud services, existing solutions and shared services. Office 365TM is at the heart of NRW’s strategy and was chosen as it would support the early days of the new organisation by providing cost effective browser based functionality to staff, who at that time were operating on three separate systems. The core functionality at that time was email, intranet and document management.
In selecting Office 365 NRW knew that it wouldn’t meet all of their business needs and that additional tools would be required. One requirement was to support the management of email content as part of formal records management. User adoption of any new system was a critical factor. Staff were facing significant changes and it was important that any new tools could be deployed with minimum impact.
Over a four month period, NRW completed a comprehensive review of products available under the G-Cloud programme that could potentially allow this requirement to be met with Office 365. This resulted in the selection of Repstor affinity and its rapid roll out to all users of the NRW Office 365 system.
The NRW G-Cloud procurement included comprehensive presentations and demonstrations of the products alongside subsequent evaluation of the software on the Natural Resources Wales Office 365 system. Repstor affinity was chosen because when the extensive evaluation was completed the product was seen to provide the best value for money including providing everything that was needed to meet all of the functional and non-functional requirements in the most effective manner. Critical to this was the depth of integration with Outlook for ease of use, adoption and configurability of the product to meet the very specific requirements without any customisation.
“Repstor affinity is a key part of our Office 365 deployment. Its quick deployment and ease of use has meant that users have adopted the system without the need for any special training enabling us to seamlessly bring users on board, focusing on ensuring that our policies are effectively implemented,” Debra Jones, Project Manager, Natural Resources Wales.
“The ease of use particularly around filing and retrieval of content has been an essential part of rolling out this project without the need for a large change management effort on our part around the use of the software,” adds Debra.
Repstor products were seen as being the best performing, most tightly integrated and most feature rich option while being the easiest for users to adopt, meaning that users are more productive and are able to take advantage of the software with zero training requirements.
To read the full Natural Resource Wales case study click here.
Supporting Resources:
- To learn more about how Repstor affinity can help with user adoption of ECM systems watch our video at https://www.repstor.com/videos/affinity-the-ecm-system-everyone-knows-how-to-use
- For more information on the affinity product visit: https://www.repstor.com/products-for-ecm-adoption/affinity
- For more information on the assist product visit: https://www.repstor.com/products-for-ecm-adoption/assist
- To download a free trial of the affinity product visit: https://www.repstor.com/products-for-ecm-adoption/try-our-software
About Natural Resources Wales
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) is the largest Welsh Government Sponsored Body – employing 1,900 staff across Wales with a budget of £180 million. It was formed in April 2013, largely taking over the functions of the Countryside Council for Wales, Forestry Commission Wales and the Environment Agency in Wales, as well as certain Welsh Government functions. Learn more at http://naturalresources.wales.
About Repstor
Repstor was created to inspire ECM Adoption. We are dedicated to developing products that enable collaboration and compliance for the Outlook-centric workforce. Repstor’s products make access to content systems easy and intuitive for users, by providing access to them within the familiar interface of Microsoft® Outlook®. By making access to the content system easy and intuitive for users, we overcome the main cause of failed deployments of ECM systems – failure of users to adopt the system.
Our products are ideal for mobile, remote and semi-disconnected users especially in industries like Professional Services, Legal, Oil and Gas, Public Sector and other regulated industries. We significantly reduce change management costs when rolling out systems, improve ROI for existing systems, and fully support Microsoft Office 365.
For further press information please contact Olivia Bushe at Repstor:
Email: olivia.bushe@repstor.com or telephone +44 (0)28 9072 6061.
For more information please visit www.repstor.com.
“In our desire to make life easier and more productive for our customers, while finding solutions that users love, we are delighted to partner with Repstor as their technology offers solutions that make ECM easy. Repstor affinity provides intuitive access to any ECM repository, from Microsoft Outlook. Repstor affinity’s interface provides the simple behaviour of filing and collaborating from within Outlook even though the user is saving content to an ECM system,” says René Beulen, Managing Partner at Transform Data.
Alan McMillen, Repstor CEO commented, “By partnering with Transform Data we have extended our reach further into the Benelux and Nordics regions. This partnership will allow us to develop business jointly in these important regions, and will enable us to provide effective local support for Repstor resellers in these regions. The Repstor product range continues to develop with the ethos that the company was built on – making happier users. We create products that users will adopt by making them intuitive and familiar. Transform Data also strives to increase users’ productivity –making it a natural fit for our companies to partner.”