Coomera Anglican College is a leading Gold Coast private Christian school that develops young minds in a future-focused learning environment. The school has over 1500 students, from Early Learning and Preparatory through to Year 12, and is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Docuworx recently spoke with Darryl Hall, IT Services Manager at Coomera Anglican College, regarding some of the positive outcomes the school has achieved by using the DocuWare DMS, implemented by Docuworx.
What led to you seeking out a document management solution (DMS)?
We were previously using a legacy DMS which met some of the College’s needs as far as document storage was concerned in the past. The system lacked required levels of functionality for users, had some security issues as well as some privacy concerns.
Understandably, the last thing that we want is a data breach, so we needed to ensure that any system being considered met our high security standards. In addition, the Anglican Diocese recently reviewed and updated its retention policy which, stipulates how long we have to keep documents for and when they can be archived or destroyed. Our legacy system just wasn’t up to this task.
Search functionality was another pain point. We have 25 years’ worth of documents, and some legacy setup issues that impacted on the indexing of documents. In some circumstances searching for a document using the legacy system, it could take one of our staff members up to half an hour to bring up close matches and then manually go through each one to find the actual document we were after.
How has DocuWare helped?
Docuware has provided a platform where we can now be fully compliant with our retention policy.. In addition, we have been able to streamline some of our processes, and we know it will continue to provide further opportunities for processes to be streamlined as we move forward.
The optical character recognition (OCR), Intelligent Indexing and workflow capabilities of DocuWare has saved our Accounts Payable (AP) a considerable amount of time. We will look to automate our AP process as we move forward, and know that this will be an easy process with DocuWare.
Our old system was a very laborious process, to have to add all the metadata manually after scanning the documents. With DocuWare, it automatically detects each invoice and matches it to the right vendor, saving the College many hours of tedious manual work every month.
For document management, DocuWare allows us to access all documents immediately no matter where they are stored in the system
All our records are now being migrated into DocuWare, including documents in our legacy system. Confidential notes, or those with restricted access are easily managed with the permissions in DocuWare. This security is a great feature of DocuWare and provides peace of mind to our college management and college council, as it easily takes care of legislative privacy requirements.
DocuWare also supports the use of web forms, which is another project we have coming up. Presently, we have several forms that we send out as PDF or are Microsoft Word documents. We want to make as many of these forms electronic to activate a workflow process and DocuWare will make that whole process a lot easier for us, from the initiation of the form, processing and capturing data, and storage of information.
How easy was it to integrate and implement DocuWare?
We have been able to seamlessly integrate DocuWare with our school management system (TASS) without the need of having a developer integrate an application programming interface (API) connection.
If teachers want to find a document related to any student, they can search the College management system. DocuWare has overlay buttons within our College Management System which, based on a student ID instantly shows all the documentation related to that student.
On the implementation side of things, we now have approximately 50 people using DocuWare, including teachers and administration staff. This number will continue to grow as the system is more imbedded in our operations.
The user interface is easy to use and very intuitive. We hold training sessions but usually, after the second one, staff are confident enough to use the system without assistance..
The staff have pretty much been able to pick it up on their own and then see the benefits of the solution when they start using it.
From my point of view as an IT Manager that’s great, because it means we have implemented a solution that is user-friendly, and my team and I don’t have to continually “hand-hold” the staff.
Would you recommend DocuWare and Docuworx to other schools?
I would unreservedly recommend Docuworx and DocuWare to other schools and businesses. It works particularly well in a school environment with high compliance requirements.
In the process of looking for a new DMS, we also looked at three other solutions. DocuWare was the only DMS software that supported us natively without the use of a third party.
The level of service and support that we got through Docuworx has been exceptional. Whenever we have had any issue, we put in a support ticket and a Docuworx team member responds quickly, with a response on the same day, and the issue addressed promptly. It has been a pleasure working with the Docuworx team.
Darryl Hall
IT Services Manager
