As organisations increasingly move towards digital platforms for content creation and distribution, the need for an efficient archiving system has become crucial.
Working with a major name in UK transport infrastructure, we implemented a Microsoft Power Automate archiving process for Microsoft SharePoint news posts.
Requirements
As a significant national organisation, the infrastructure organisation generates a significant amount of news and information for its approximately 42,000 staff hosted on its SharePoint Online platform.
Given the pace of the transport industry, this information has a tendency to go out of date quickly, requiring it to be archived for the record.
The traditional archiving process involves multiple manual steps, making it time-consuming and prone to errors. Content managers had to sift through a plethora of SharePoint news posts, manually converting them to PDFs, sorting them based on specific tags and dates, and then transferring them to long-term storage.
This manual process was inefficient, resulting in both delays and inconsistencies in archiving.
Power Automate Archiving Solution
To solve this issue, Akita designed a custom workflow in Microsoft Power Automate to take care of this intricate process.
The Power Automate flow is triggered each time a new SharePoint news post is published. It takes the entire content of the page - including text, links, images, and other elements - and converts them into a PDF file.
The PDF files are then subject to smart filtering, using SharePoint metadata tags and the dates they were published to categorise and sort them automatically.
Post-filtering, these PDFs are stored in a specific Microsoft Teams channel dedicated to archiving. Archivists are notified within the Teams channel every time a new page is archived.
To manage archived information and allow users to access it if necessary, a small SharePoint Online site was then developed. This site lists all the archived pages and allows them to be marked as moved into the long-term archive storage solution. Archivists can simply view a list of newly archived pages they haven’t yet processed, making it easier to manage their workload.
Results
The Power Automate archiving process has introduced a significant improvement in efficiency. Archivists no longer need to perform repetitive tasks, reducing the likelihood of errors and enabling them to focus on more value-added activities.
Moreover, the Teams channel acts as a preliminary archive and a communication hub, facilitating better team coordination. The SharePoint site for managing workload has streamlined the task of long-term archiving, making it seamless and error-free. It also adds a layer of intelligence through smart filtering and seamless coordination through Teams, supporting overall better compliance and governance of news.
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