Andrew Crisp (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development)
The new Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was born and will remain a Microsoft shop.
HUD was established last October, bringing together functions from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Ministry of Social Development, Housing New Zealand and the Tamaki Redevelopment Company.
The Ministry made a tactical choice at the time to use Microsoft's Office 365 suite for desktop productivity and Microsoft SharePoint for document management.
SharePoint was chosen because "it was part of the Office 365 suite", a tender for further services released this week has stated.
"Over the last few months, HUD ICT have made a strategic decision to continue to use SharePoint as HUD’s ongoing DMS and a project is underway to update the DMS taxonomy to create a sustainable and replicable infrastructure architecture design within the next three months," the tender said.
Now documents from HUD's foundation agencies have to be shifted from their legacy platforms into the HUD managed service environment.
Last year, Reseller News reported on a slew of agencies upgrading or adopting Office 365, which included Television New Zealand, NZ Police, WorkSafe and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
Since then the momentum has continued with EQC and Tourism NZ making similar shifts.
HUD now aims to enhance and extend its document management platform to ensure that staff have access to their key historical information, can work effectively and to ensure compliance with the Public Records Act.
Documents will need to be shifted from MBIE's OpenText system, MSD's Objective and Treasury's iManage, as well as from legacy agency shared workspaces and shared drives.
The tender is described as an opportunity the successful organisation to become a strategic partner for HUD and to assist it with the evolution and innovation of its SharePoint Online platform.
