Case Study: Manawatu District Council achieves searchable SharePoint and improved document discovery with DocsCorp contentCrawler

How contentCrawler improves the user experience of searching in Microsoft SharePoint

Manawatu District Council (MDC), which serves roughly 30,000 people, faced a major content-discovery challenge after migrating nearly 200,000 documents from unsupported legacy systems into Microsoft SharePoint. Many migrated files were image-based (PDF, TIFF, MSG) with little or no metadata, making them non-searchable and putting compliance with the Public Records Act and Archives New Zealand standards at risk. To solve this, MDC chose DocsCorp’s contentCrawler to OCR and convert those files into searchable PDFs.

DocsCorp integrated contentCrawler with MDC’s SharePoint to process new items (scanning additions within 24 hours) and to work through a backlog of 76,061 files needing OCR, supporting PDF, TIF, and MSG files and compressing documents to suit council workflows. The result was markedly better search performance—staff are finding more content more easily—improved access and record discoverability for compliance, and ongoing automated processing of both new and legacy content.

Manawatu District Council

Mel Rush

Information Team Leader