"We have been delighted in the performance of DocBanq from our clients' sites and the security of having people access their area of interest with full version control."
Conni Christensen, Principal Consultant
 

Summary

Synercon Management Consulting is an Australian company, operating in all states of Australia and overseas.  Synercon provides highly tailored information and records management advice to private and public organisations.  This takes a variety of forms; from analysis, reports and training to the provision of customised thesauri.

Synercon is also the creator and supplier of the software a.k.a.®, Australia's foremost tool for the development of taxonomies and records retention & disposal schedules.

DocBanq has allowed Synercon to interact with, and develop a way of working with clients that was not previously possible.  Using DocBanq enhances their relationship with the client and provides for a very controlled and professional outcome with documentary and thesauri deliverables.

The Challenge

Synercon is a supplier of professional services in relation to information and records management for a wide variety of private and public sector organisations.  These services includes:

• analysis of organisational information management needs and legislative obligations;
• development and provision of customised training to help organisations achieve their information management goals; and
• the analysis and development of customised thesauri for allowing the classification and disposal of information within the organisation inline with their legal obligations.

The 'deliverable' is frequently documentation; a report, a training plan or package of a thesaurus.  In most cases, the documentation has not only a high value to the customer but also requires their input.  Existing methods of sharing and developing these documentation deliverables with clients by e-mail has proven to be error-prone and unreliable.

"Many of our documents end up being quite large which makes them impractical to e-mail as many recipients have e-mail attachments size limits," said Conni Christensen, Principal Consultant at Synercon.  "In addition, after a few revisions, backwards and forwards via e-mail, it is easy for the client (and us!) to lose track of which is the latest version of a document."

"DocBanq allows us to collaborate on documents, including with the client if necessary, with the version control ensuring that the latest version of the document is always used," added Conni.  "We also use the DocBanq Shortcuts to e-mail the references of documents to clients which means they can get the document directly from DocBanq without clogging up their e-mail."

"We have set up templates for our consultants to use which increases the consistency of our product as well as capturing the expertise of the organisation developed after many years of consulting in this field," said Conni.

As an embodiment of their years of professional expertise, Synercon has also developed a.k.a.®, a class-leading software tool for the development of taxonomies and thesauri.  This tool is available as a stand-alone package for clients as well as being used by Synercon consultants in their day-to-day work.

DocBanq is used to manage both the source code for the software product as well as the thesauri that it is used to create.

"We use DocBanq for managing and distributing new versions of the code for both the development of a.k.a.® and our beta test programs. Before DocBanq, it was very difficult to distribute and control test versions of the software, and security was an issue," added Conni.

"We now use DocBanq to manage the software versions and can notifiy our customers that a new version is available by using DocBanq Shortcuts. Also, when we develop thesauri for clients, they can reliably and securely access them directly without all the problems that we previously had with e-mail."

The Results

DocBanq has allowed Synercon to develop stronger links with their clients by providing a collaborative document and records management environment that increases transparency by using document version control and increase reliability by negating the requirement to send large documents as e-mail attachments, which ultimately enhances their professionalism and appeal to their clients.

"We have been delighted in the performance of DocBanq from our clients' sites and the security of having people access their area of interest with full version control," concluded Conni.

Web: http://www.synercon.com.au/