A highly tool-able ECMS to meet almost any requirement set

We currently use OnBase by Hyland as our primary records management repository across most of the organization. Our largest processes that are managed in-system use Agenda Management (for City Council, Planning Commission, and a few other boards and committees) and Electronic Plan Review for all of our engineering, commercial building, and many zoning permit projects. These are also powered by OnBase Workflow for process automation, and Application Enabler to assist in document capture and retrieval from third-party systems.

I wasn't present when our organization acquired our OnBase solution in 2014, but knowing what bit I do of the selection process back then, I would have advised the team from 2014 to consider not just document management and retention when evaluating content management solutions, but the process management and integration capabilities as well. On those grounds, I'm sure Hyland's OnBase would be at the head of the pack.

If a type of content has unique business value, security needs, retention, or reporting abilities, it should be kept in its own document type. Also, don't go overboard with keywords - use (and re-use) meaningful ones so that content can be related to other content more easily. And let your line-of-business systems drive ID values: if you can use it to look-up something in an external system, have OnBase leverage it as a keyword or attribute so that you can tie it to that system more easily.

I am unaware of the existence of a tiered support system via Hyland. Presently, when we have support needs, we can submit tickets via the Hyland Community site and receive an initial response within an hour or so during normal business hours. If resolution for our issue requires the editing of configuration files within our hosted cloud solution, there may be a lag of a few hours to a business day or so while support waits for a staff resource from the cloud management team for assistance.

After our migration to the Hyland Cloud at the end of 2020, one of our staff members realized that several old meeting videos that came from an older system we migrated back in 2017 to OnBase appeared to be missing. We logged a request with Hyland via the community site, and this started a multi-month long investigation into what had happened to the missing historical media. The issue was escalated and managed by Hyland's Customer Success team and several product experts and developers within Hyland weighed-in on the issue. Eventually, one expert discovered a location on an intermediate encoding server where all of the missing media still resided. Hyland's team then developed a special process to extract these records and re-insert them into our solution where they belonged.

It was a difficult and niche issue that was ultimately resolved with no additional workload on our staff - all thanks to investigation and creative problem-solving on behalf of Hyland's team.