Less paper. Less admin. More control.

The problem

MMU's Governance and Secretariat team runs planning meetings for 27 committees, made up of staff and external members who meet several times a year. Every meeting meant assembling, printing, and physically delivering a pack of documents to each member. Time-consuming, expensive, and wasteful.

On top of that, when committee members needed documents from previous meetings, someone had to go and find them. As the archive grew, that was getting harder and harder.

MMU wanted to go paperless, stay compliant with strict record retention policies, and use the project as a launchpad for a wider SharePoint rollout across the university.

Why Waterstons

MMU ran a competitive tender. We won it.

Our track record in higher education helped. So did our understanding of large-scale SharePoint delivery. But what really landed was our approach: flexible, pragmatic, and focused on getting the right outcome rather than locking everything down upfront.

MMU could refine the scope as the project progressed. That meant no nasty surprises, and a solution that actually matched what they needed.

What we built

We designed and implemented a SharePoint team site for the Governance and Secretariat team. It gives them:

• A central document library for all meeting materials
• Personalised views for each committee member, showing their tasks and diary
• Browser-based document access, no downloads needed
• iPad access via SharePlus for committee members on the move
• Secure remote access using SSL, with Active Directory authentication
• A separate SharePoint Records Centre with automated workflows to enforce document retention policies

We also built some bespoke functionality to make life easier:

• Automatic permissions. Documents are restricted to the relevant committee members the moment they're uploaded. No manual permission-setting required.
• Retention notifications. Document owners get email alerts at set intervals before a document is due to expire, so nothing falls through the cracks.

What it changed

The results were straightforward and immediate:

• Meeting admin is faster and cheaper. The manual assembly and delivery of paper packs is gone.
• Committee members can access documents 24/7, from anywhere with an internet connection.
• Everything is secure and compliant with the university's retention policies.
• MMU's IT team were involved from day one, so they can manage, support, and develop the site themselves going forward.
• New starters can be inducted on the platform internally. No external trainers needed.

"Waterstons' flexible approach has empowered the MMU team to continue building upon the delivery and given them a greater insight into the capabilities of the technology. This will assist the whole organisation in the development of future projects using this platform."

 John Mullis, Business Improvement Team Programme Manager, MMU

What happened next

Once the Governance and Secretariat team had seen what SharePoint could do, other parts of the university wanted in.

A team coordinating a campus consolidation used a SharePoint site to manage architectural plans, with custom metadata to organise documents by building and floor. No more emailing files back and forth. No more version confusion.

Staff also started creating personal sites to store documents and share information with colleagues. And MMU came back to us to build a bespoke web part pulling academic timetable data from a third-party system directly into SharePoint.

One project. A lot of momentum.