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Victoria University

All staff members and students at Victoria are potential readers of policy. Policy documents must be well managed with effective dates, review dates and contact name and role details clearly stated.

In mid-2002, the University identified a need to replace the existing Policy Framework, for the following reasons:

"The existing Policy Framework is a complex custom-built application. Policies are split into constituent parts and stored fragmented in a database. Policies are rebuilt as they are retrieved. The complexity of the system makes it difficult to administer."

The need to improve the policy control processes was identified as a University strategic objective. The goal was to produce:

  • A consistent University-wide process for writing, approving, disseminating, and maintaining policy
  • A centralised policy directory and repository accessible by all staff and students.
  • A repository that is electronic and web-enabled.

Victoria University issued a Request For Proposal (RFP) for a replacement Policy Framework system, and after evaluation of several systems chose Silent One Ltd to implement the SilentOne Electronic Document Management system.

Implementation

Silent One Ltd worked closely with the Policy Framework project team from Victoria University to plan and execute the implementation of SilentOne into the University environment.

As Victoria had clearly defined their requirements for the system, Silent One Ltd was able to complete the installation in a relatively short period of time (~ 40 hours).

The system was configured to allow public access via the Internet to the SilentOne 'passive' (HTML-only) browser client. A limited number of Victoria University staff were then given access to the full SilentOne 'active' client, allowing them to add and meta-data profile the policy documents.

A gateway page was developed (by the web design company responsible for Victoria's website) to provide a link between the University website and the policy repository. The gateway page provides links to predefined searches, commonly-accessed documents, and also the ability to run a search directly from the gateway page.

The decision was made to provide both MS Word format and Adobe PDF format of each policy document, to ensure that all users of the system could view documents regardless of the computer they happened to be using. SilentOne allows both 'renditions' of the document to be treated as a single document for meta-data and indexing purposes.

SilentOne was customised to match the Victoria website "look and feel", with the University logo and colour scheme replacing the SilentOne defaults. Any functionality that was not applicable to a policy reader (i.e. public user) was disabled.

Quotes

Alison Holt (Project Manager, Information Technology Services)

"SilentOne has provided Victoria University with a stable, low maintenance and user-friendly policy system. The customisations (change of colour and the addition of the Victoria logo) enable the policy site to fit in very well with our web environment.

The installation was quick and reasonably 'stress-free' thanks to good planning, our Systems team and the excellent technical support from Silent One Ltd."

"Victoria University's requirements were to provide 'open access' to the University's policy, statue and media release documents to both internal and external users but without the need for password access.

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