There are three ways in which Topaz Filer can be deployed. This article will take you through them.
As background, you may wish to read Integrating Topaz Filer With Your Systems before proceeding.
"On-premises" Deployment
This is the “classic style” of installing an application. In this scenario you will already have a server for your
filing model (practice management system [“PMS”], customer relationship management [“CRM”] or similar), a server for your
store (document management system [“DMS”] or SharePoint) and the
Topaz Filer server. Users then run Topaz Filer from within Microsoft Outlook. All of this occurs on your private network. This diagram illustrates
:(In reality most customers will not have a dedicated piece of hardware for the Topaz Filer server and will run the application on an existing server that undertakes other activities.)
The advantage of this approach is that you have maximum flexibility as to the filing model and the store. The disadvantage of the approach is that it Topaz Filer becomes another thing for your IT team to manage.
Hosted SharePoint
See
Filing Emails with Microsoft SharePoint for more information on SharePoint.
SharePoint is becoming more and more prevalent as a document store for law firms and other professional service firms. Microsoft is continuing to make heavy investment into the product, and it integrates excellently with Office 2007. In addition, it’s price point is significantly below more traditional DMS and enterprise content management (“ECM”) providers.
A common deployment strategy for SharePoint is to partner with another organisation such that the SharePoint implementation is “outsourced” as a managed process. Topaz Filer can handle this deployment, illustrated with this diagram:
In this approach you still have flexibility with regards to the filing model, and you also need a Topaz Filer server as per the on-premises deployment above.
The advantage of this approach is that your IT team does not have to worry about managing the SharePoint installation. Perhaps more importantly, these services also provide guarantees with regards to backing up the information in the SharePoint store. The disadvantages with the approach are that accessing SharePoint over the Internet will be a little bit slower and you are dependent on a third-party managing your data.
Fully Hosted Solution - aka "Topaz Filer HT"
For customers that are keen to have email filing capability with SharePoint as the store but want a “low impact” on their IT department we offer a fully managed service whereby we run the servers. We call it
Topaz Filer HT. All that needs to be installed on your computers is the add-in to Microsoft Outlook that enables the functionality. This diagram illustrates:
For more information, please read
Fully Hosted Solution - "Topaz Filer HT".
