Archiving large-scale document managment with old legacy systems is a challenge that many organizations currently face. Legacy systems continue to move to a state of being unsupportable by IT, and any upgrades that can be done are expensive and time-consuming. SharePoint eliminates these frustrations by offering businesses a scalable, flexible, and efficient platform that grows with their document management needs over time. The biggest challenge in adopting SharePoint as a document management system is end-user adoption. Users care most about having an interface that supports a friendly and intuitive document upload and search experience. Out-of-the- box, the Bing style search results, folder navigation, and metadata requirements of SharePoint can make users frustrated. However, SharePoint can be customized to meet user needs. With the right design and platform architecture, SharePoint can deliver a great — and highly functional – user experience that leaves legacy system preferences in the past. Delivering a great SharePoint user experience starts with a good SQL database management strategy to support folder structure. SharePoint can handle millions of documents in a single library and 5,000 documents in a single library folder. A SharePoint library can be configured by content type and metadata. This allows users to capture key search terms such as project number and document category. Customizable libraries give users the ability to configure a workflow that is alignment with core business process objectives. The SharePoint user experience is further enhanced by a customizable and automatable document upload process. Tedious but important tasks such as folder upload selection, metadata labeling, and file naming can all be automated to reduce the administrative burden of document uploads while instituting an organization-wide document upload standard. The SharePoint search experience can also be customized, allowing users to enter a combination of keywords and metadata queries and receive a set of matching documents in tabular layout. Additionally, there is advanced search, which lets users create granular search queries, identifying as many or as few parameters as needed. Like the rest of SharePoint, advanced search can be customized to include metadata as part of the search process. A customized SharePoint deployment makes searching for documents as simple or as detailed as users need the process to be. Through a series of stakeholder interviews, usability audits and improvement suggestions, General Networks eliminates user abandonment and other frustrations associated with switching document management systems. Before deploying to scale, users interact with SharePoint to ensure that needs have been met and all platform functions and features are accessible and understood across the organization. Deploying a user-approved SharePoint platform takes time. But when done correctly, the end result is a platform that makes document management an efficient business process that scales easily, saves time, and dramatically reduces costs. CASESTUDY Replacing a Legacy Document Management System with a Customized SharePoint Solution A public policy research organization asked General Networks to replace a legacy document management system with a customized SharePoint solution. The organization was using an older version of Oracle I / PM for document archiving and project approval. The system, which had a high user approval rating, had not been updated in many years. IT no longer wanted to invest the time and resources needed to support the system and didn’t want to commit the financial and personnel resources to an Oracle upgrade. The organization was already using SharePoint for team collaboration. This familiarity with SharePoint and its customization options led the way to stakeholder buy-in. After conducting a SharePoint environment assessment, General Networks developed a list of organizational challenges that needed to be addressed before SharePoint could be deployed at scale. The new document management system would need to be able to archive hundreds of thousands of existing files while providing 10 9 CREATING A GREAT user experience FOR LARGE SCALE DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT IN SharePoint