Barnsley Council drives efficiency with 1Spatial and FME

1Spatial plc, the spatial solutions provider, supported Barnsley Council in getting continual return on their original FME investment by automating the migration of over five million documents.

Barnsley’s old Document Management System (DMS) was ten years old and had not been developed in recent years. It was also, as ICT Manager Riley Marsden explains, “a very niche product. We were the only UK customer and had just one member of staff supporting it. As a result, he was the only guy in the UK who could manage the software.”

The council decided to move to the more widely supported Microsoft SharePoint as its new DMS, but the decision left Riley’s team with the challenge of migrating ten years’ worth of documents from the old system to the new.

Riley realised that Barnsley might already have the tool it needed. In recent years, the team had become experts in Safe Software’s data integration application, FME. Recognising that the existing DMS was essentially a database of documents, and with support from 1Spatial, the team developed a solution using FME and SharePoint web services to upload the documents, along with all required meta-data, into SharePoint.

David Eagle, FME Division Manager commented, “It’s great working with Riley and his team at Barnsley because they aren’t afraid to innovate. Their investment in FME is constantly squeezed to extract every last drop of value and with FME, they are striving to drive through efficiencies in process to save cost across departments.”

FME has proved to be a powerful and versatile tool for Barnsley and, despite having developed significant skills over recent years, Riley and the team still draw on 1Spatial for training and consultancy support. As a leading, global Platinum Partner and Value Added Reseller for Safe Software, 1Spatial helps customers to release the full value of FME.

“What we know about FME, and the experience we have, comes from 1Spatial. They have given us the ability to think about problems in terms of data transformation and workflows, and they’ve given us the FME skills to resolve those problems,” Riley commented.

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