Microsoft Customer SolutionCustomer Solution Case Study

Hydro One powers new document management platform with SharePoint 2007

OverviewCountry or Region: CanadaIndustry: Energy

Customer ProfileHydro One Inc. is the largest electricity transmission and distribution company in the province of Ontario, valued at US$12.79 billion as measured by total assets.

Business SituationWith approximately 5,800 employees, Hydro One needed to ensure that staff had access to one version of the truth — accurate and real-time information no matter where they work.

SolutionThe company is using SharePoint 2007 to help ensure that documents are organized automatically and can be quickly accessed from a centralized location.

Benefits Centralized document management Strong data protection Improved productivity and information

value

“Staff like the fact that there is now a single version of the truth as we’ve improved version control with SharePoint Server 2007. Operating within a more centralized environment also makes it easier

Norm Crook, Director of IT, Hydro One

Hydro One Inc. is the largest electricity transmission and distribution company in Ontario, valued at US$12.79 billion in total assets. It serves more than 1.3 million customers across Ontario’s municipalities and rural areas. With 5,800 full time and 2,000 contract, temporary and part-time employees, Hydro One needed to ensure that staff had access to one version of the truth — accurate and real-time information no matter where they work. Today, Hydro One is using an enterprise document management system based on Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007. The company is using the technology to help ensure that documents are organized automatically and can be quickly accessed from a centralized location.

SituationConnecting Ontario companies and communities to safe and reliable electricity is job one for Hydro One. Wholly owned by the province, Hydro One owns and operates Ontario’s 29,000 km high-voltage transmission network that delivers electricity to large industrial customers and municipal utilities. The company is also responsible for the 123,000 km low-voltage distribution system that serves about 1.3 million end-use customers and smaller municipal utilities in the province.

Hydro One ranks among the largest electricity distributors in North America and has been recognized for its commitment to supplying clean renewable energy across the province; the company was recently named the 2009 Sustainability Company of the Year by the Canadian Electricity Association for its environment commitment, social responsibility and economic excellence. Hydro One staff are made up of both office workers and field workers from various departments — including Engineering & Projects, Customer Operations, Grid Operations, — across various offices within the province.

Staff collaboration and communication is mission-critical at Hydro One: whether it is sharing meter and billing information with internal and external groups, or working with management and staff at various levels on business or customer-facing issues, workers need to quickly share and access information and reports in their day-to-day duties. The company was challenged by the fact that the IT infrastructure lacked a centralized and standardized enterprise content management (ECM) environment. Finding information often results in an

extended search among paper documents, emails and department file shares across the organization.

“With approximately 5,800 employees and 2,000 contract, temp and part-time employees , our teams had difficulty locating information quickly,” says Hydro One’s director of IT Norm Crook. “Our storage costs were rising and it was information overload for workers trying to find the latest versions of documents accessed and used across the company.”

To help reduce the time staff spent searching for content, Hydro One wanted to put in place a more comprehensive document management platform, one that would help staff consolidate information and improve its document search capabilities.

“The goal was to increase the level of automation and put stronger search and compliance processes in place. We needed to address the issue of various versions of a document floating around and ensure that everyone was on the same proverbial page,” says Crook.

SolutionHydro One determined that it needed to improve document and records management. In late 2009, the company embarked on a technology project to refresh its IT infrastructure. As part of an initiative known internally as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Hydro One developed a new enterprise document management system based on Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 being the presentation and collaboration work space.

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“We decided to use SharePoint Server 2007 as the foundation for our ECM project because it provides a comprehensive platform for collaboration. The IT team is now migrating all of the information and data from all our business units,” says Crook. “We also liked the fact that SharePoint 2007 has the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office, which helped our staff quickly learn the new environment.”

Staff are using the new ECM environment to quickly develop team sites and ensure stronger collaboration and content management. The Content Type Hub feature in SharePoint Server 2007 allows the company to centralize document management. Content fields, policies, workflows, templates, and other rules for a specific kind of content, such as a business report, are specified across team sites.

The actual rollout involved a phased approach. This included reaching out to staff within the Record Management and Documents Management departments to develop a small test user group and “go in and play with the feature set and functionality,” says Crook. Team participants set up test file shares and intranet sites to share and collaborate on documents.

“One of the great features is that now we have information housed in a single repository, which helps to eliminate duplicate data through stronger version control,” says Crook.

The environment also offers a range of features to help users organize and store documents, from specialized sites such as

the Records Repository to loosely structured document libraries for quick document creation and collaboration.

“It was a case of build it and they would come,” says Crook. “Early users loved the functionality and ability to access and share documents quickly. It didn’t take long for staff to realize that SharePoint can help improve productivity and collaboration.” Hydro One is taking advantage of the ECM platform to help manage documents, records and web content on a single platform. The company is using Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 with SharePoint 2007 to share company webcasts and videos within the new ECM platform environment. Hydro One is also looking to extend the new environment by integrating its IT infrastructure to include Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, and the Windows® 7 operating system. Current plans are underway to migrate from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

BenefitsHydro One is using SharePoint 2007 as the foundation for a company-wide document management system. As the presentation layer, SharePoint has allowed Hydro One to have one tool for all end users to collaborate or share either internally or through the www.HydroOne.com website.

Centralized document management With the ECM environment in place, Hydro One employees, no matter where they are located, will have access to the latest versions of documents. With SharePoint 2007 in place, Hydro One has a more

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centralized approach to data management and storage and a more collaborative environment for teams.

“Staff like the fact that they can more easily share documents and be more collaborative with teams. From a document management perspective, there is now a single version of the truth as we’ve improved file version control with SharePoint Server 2007,” says Crook. “Operating within a more centralized environment also makes it easier for us to tackle data governance and data accessibility challenges.”

Strong data protectionThe company is taking advantage of the Compliant Enterprise feature of SharePoint to ensure strong controls around confidential information. Compliant Enterprise helps to ensure that the proper controls are applied to data as it moves between teams. Hydro One is also using the metadata capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007 to apply tags to documents, making it easier for staff to find information. “The makeup of our staff is changing as retirees give way to a younger work force. Using SharePoint as the document management foundation allows us to encourage a collaborative environment and effectively manage intellectual property to ensure that only authorized staff can view confidential information,” says Crook.

Improved productivity and information valuePreviously, without a comprehensive content management environment in place, employees spent a great deal of time consolidating information, trying to maintain version control, and preventing duplication of their efforts. The company is using SharePoint 2007 to quickly set up compliance policies, while the familiar interface lets staff work just as they would in Microsoft® Office.“We’re using the enterprise search capabilities of SharePoint 2007 to help employees find information faster,” says Crook. “The feedback from staff has been that they can more easily and frequently publish and update information to share knowledge and find needed resources. This helps improve staff productivity across the organization.”

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Hydro One products and services, visit the website at: http://www.hydroone.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published May 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Office− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

2007