Document ONE facilitates collaboration

"Choosing Document ONE as the base for our new system enabled us to solve a raft of problems in a very quick timeframe. We have now been using Document ONE for over 2 years and have been delighted with its robustness and stability."

New Zealand's Ministry of Transport works with the transport Crown entities to give effect to the government's vision of an affordable, integrated, safe, responsive and sustainable transport system.

As the government's principal transport policy adviser, the Ministry both leads and generates policy within the framework of the government's Transport Strategy. In addition the Ministry negotiates, on behalf of New Zealand, bilateral and multilateral air services agreements, and is the licensing authority for foreign international airlines operating services to and from New Zealand.

The Ministry also acts as the Minister of Transport's agent for managing the interface with the transport Crown Entities, the Aviation Security Service, and the National Rescue Co-ordination Centre, which are responsible for the day-to-day hands-on management of New Zealand’s daily traffic, aviation, rail and maritime activities.

To carry out its duties effectively, the Ministry needs to collaborate closely with the Minister of Transport’s office, which is effectively a different organization with its own staff and systems.

Need for Fast and Effective Collaboration

The Ministry was using a Lotus Notes-based system to regularly submit large numbers of documents to the Minister’s office for review and approval, but this system had several limitations which hindered the ability of the Ministry to collaborate quickly and effectively with the Minister’s office.

For example, Ministry staff had to create documents outside of the system, and then remember to put them into the system before they were due to be submitted to the Minister’s office. As documents were also sent to the Minister’s office in hard copy format, the situation often arose where the electronic document had not been received by the Minister’s office by the time the physical document arrived.

Both Ministry staff and staff at the Minister’s office also found it difficult to quickly find and retrieve documents in the old system, which was a real issue given the importance of many of the documents being exchanged between the two offices and the need to often quickly make changes to them.

Document ONE a Good Fit

When the need to find a replacement system became urgent, the Ministry turned to Reliance Software Ltd for help.

Reliance’s Document ONE product was quickly identified as being an ideal base for the new system:

It was already installed in other government agencies, so the Ministry was confident about its performance;
It was based on Lotus Notes which meant it would integrate directly into the Ministry’s existing Lotus Notes environment; and
Because it had been specifically designed as a comprehensive document management system, it already contained most of the functionality the Ministry required to support the creating and sharing of documents.

Within a month of receiving the approval to proceed, Reliance had implemented a customized version of Document ONE (christened Docmins) at both the Ministry and the Minister’s office, and imported all of the documents from the old system into an archive document library that enabled users to search across both the old and the new system at once.

Once the new system had been bedded down Reliance then provided further enhancements such as a suite of reports that the Ministry could use to measure its performance.

Reliability and Additional Functionality Appreciated

Given their familiarity with Lotus Notes, both the Ministry’s staff and those at the Minister’s office required very little training, and very quickly appreciated the greater reliability and functionality of the new system.

Says Group Manager Finance and Support Services, Claire Johnstone, “Choosing Document ONE as the base for our new system enabled us to solve a raft of problems in a very quick timeframe. We have now been using Document ONE for over 2 years and have been delighted with its robustness and stability”.