City of West Kelowna

City of West Kelowna Goes Paperless with Microsoft 365 and Boosts Document Searchability with OCR

Update: This case study originally covered the City of West Kelowna’s migration to M365, but has since been updated to include details of Gravity Union’s custom OCR solution for the City.

About the City of West Kelowna

The City of West Kelowna is located near Okanagan Lake in BC. The municipality serves more than 38,000 people, providing arenas, indoor pool, parks and recreational programs and a police detachment to neighboring jurisdictions.

The City of West Kelowna has about 400 on their team, including seasonal staff.

Technologies

M365
Azure AI Services (previously Azure Cognitive Services)
Custom Azure function (team developed in Python)
Microsoft Graph API

By the Numbers

400 employees (including seasonal)

38,000 citizens served

Business Context and Goals

The City of West Kelowna had an on-premises environment including network drive content and a SharePoint implementation. With plans to move to a new City Hall, there was need to reduce the footprint of on-site servers and paper box storage.

Within the broader context of a paperless initiative, the goals of this project include moving to a cloud-based environment to reduce paper generation and implement regulatory controls that meet the City’s compliance needs.

Microsoft 365 is a natural fit as a platform because staff have familiarity with previous on-premises versions of the software. Microsoft 365 will also support future goals to improve efficiency by introducing automation with the Power Platform for digital workflows.

UPDATE: The City of West Kelowna needed a solution to enable text search for their non-searchable documents in SharePoint. Gravity Union’s custom OCR solution empowered the City’s team to both automatically and manually convert scanned documents into searchable text, enhancing data accessibility and retrieval efficiency.

A tailored experience for each group

Gravity Union designed the solution so that document libraries and site content are accessible wherever people are working — either Microsoft Teams or SharePoint.

To design the optimal experience, the project team starts by assessing how each department structures their content. It’s common for every department to structure content differently on the shared network drive based on how they work. The resulting SharePoint and Teams solution is designed so that the document libraries, metadata and site structure match how a department collaborates.

Some departments used the opportunity of moving to Microsoft 365 to reevaluate their processes, remove redundancies and to be more organized going forward. Migration to Microsoft 365 is a great opportunity to assess what’s required for employees to work effectively and to remove areas which cause friction.

Solution highlights

Start with governance planning and pilots

Gravity Union started working with the City of West Kelowna on a governance project to align on records management, information architecture, search, security and change management strategies and practices. These deliverables and discussions set expectations for what's involved with moving to Microsoft 365 and helped department champions plan for the change impact.

The recommended process for moving teams to Microsoft 365 is to start with pilot groups.

Migrating pilot groups allows the project team to minimize risk and build momentum for the project.

Legislative Services, Purchasing and Health & Safety departments were identified as the pilot groups. They became models for the future departments, as they had core processes that served as design patterns for the rest of the organization. For example, Legislative Services used a model where bylaws are drafted in one site, and then moved to an 'official' bylaws site for sharing across the organization. Purchasing followed a similar model for bids and contracts where bids are first drafted in a site, and then moved as final Contracts for all staff to access.

“Gravity Union helped us work more efficiently and move to Microsoft 365 in a way that works for our organization. Their expertise in Records Management and the level of effort put into delivering this solution is very much appreciated.”

— Project Manager and Supervisor at City of West Kelowna

Layer in Purview for compliance and records management

After the pilot groups started using their new Microsoft 365 sites for daily work, Gravity Union worked with the Records Management (RM) team to design the compliance solution.

Following the pilot model, the RM solution is also rolled out group by group by adapting their Local Government Management Association (LGMA) based file plan for the group’s content.

For example, for the Legislative Services team, Gravity Union, with Corporate Records Coordinator at the City, implemented a file plan that automatically classifies their business records into 14 categories such as department meetings, guides, policies, committees, FOI requests, privacy impact assessments, and council meetings — each with their own retention schedule.

Retention can be triggered by various conditions such as dates or events to accommodate for collaboration periods. For example, council records are classified one month after the meeting to give time for records to be finalized. In comparison, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are labelled and begin their retention period after the FOI request is completed.

The Purview solution consists of a file plan, auto-classification, and retention rules.

Knowledge and training

To roll out the solution successfully, Gravity Union provided general SharePoint and RM training for all staff.

This included supporting material such as a Guide to Keyword Query Language (KQL) for helping the RM team manage records and set new auto-classification conditions in the future. This was a successful implementation that follows “I Do, We Do, You Do” model to give teams time to build comfort and expertise in the RM solution.

Custom OCR script for targeted document processing

Gravity Union developed a custom script to help the City of West Kelowna apply OCR to its documents stored in SharePoint.

Leveraging Azure AI Services and Microsoft Graph API, the script was designed to locate non-searchable documents within specific libraries and automatically convert them into searchable formats. This targeted approach allows the City’s team to update existing records quickly and systematically.

Flexible and user-controlled OCR for historical records

For the City of West Kelowna’s existing documents in SharePoint, Gravity Union empowered the City’s team with a user-initiated OCR script.

This functionality allows them to selectively apply OCR to legacy files as needed, maintaining control over their document processing and to save costs and ensure that crucial records remain accessible and organized.

The image above depicts a flowchart illustrating the workflow of the OCR solution, detailing how documents are processed and converted into searchable formats.

Benefits and Results

Highly Accessible Content – Staff can now access content seamlessly across all devices, replacing previously complicated remote access solutions.
Streamlined Organization – Content is more structured, enabling staff to perform their tasks more efficiently.
Improved Records Management – Processes for records management and compliance have been improved significantly.
Enhanced Document Searchability – All new documents can be automatically OCR-processed, making critical records searchable and accessible across departments.
Empowered Team Control – The City of West Kelowna team can independently apply OCR to existing documents using the custom script, ensuring records are searchable as needed.

“The accuracy and efficiency of the OCR capabilities are impressive. It has consistently provided reliable and precise text recognition, which has greatly streamlined our document processing workflows.”

— Eugene Harley, Business Systems Analyst at City of West Kelowna