Microsoft Office System
Customer Solution Case Study
Document Management Solution Drives 1,000
Percent Sales Growth, 90 Percent Cut in TCO
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services—IT
services
Customer Profile
Morgan Street Document Systems, located
in Chicago, Illinois, provides personalized,
Web-based document services to
individuals who need to organize, share,
and protect essential information. It has
25 employees.
Business Situation
For its document management solution,
Morgan Street wanted to move from a
highly customized environment to one
that offered greater scalability, ease of
use, and reliability.
Solution
Morgan Street gained those abilities by
moving to Microsoft® Office SharePoint®
Server 2007 and related Microsoft
technologies.
Benefits
 Easy use and scalability support 1,000
percent sales increase
 Reliability beats 99.5 percent uptime
service-level agreement
 Total cost of ownership reduced by 90
percent
“We deliver a solution that meets the challenges that
high-net-worth individuals feel in managing the vast
range of documents in their lives. SharePoint Server is
crucial in helping us … address that challenge.”
Glenn Shimkus, Chief Technology Officer, Morgan Street Document Systems
Nick Rosa and Bob Shapiro, retired executives from NutraSweet
and Monsanto, needed a way to store, protect, and access their
vital personal documents—from insurance forms, medical records,
and tax documents, to sentimental letters and photos. When they
realized that many of their peers shared their need, they discovered
a software opportunity. They created Morgan Street Document
Systems and prototyped a highly customized Web site—then
realized they needed more scalability, ease of use, and reliability
than the original product could provide. Their answer was to move
to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and related Microsoft
technologies. The new solution can scale 100-fold as the company
grows, provides better than 99.5 percent uptime, and cuts the total
cost of ownership by 90 percent over the cost of the prior site.
“[The rich] are different
from you and me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author
“They have more
documents.”
Nick Rosa and Bob Shapiro, Founders,
Morgan Street Document Systems
Situation
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously
observed that the rich “are different from you
and me.” To which Ernest Hemingway
responded, “Yes, they have more money.”
And to which Nick Rosa and Bob Shapiro
would likely add, “They have more
documents.”
The two longtime friends and colleagues had
retired from their high-powered corporate
jobs and decided that they wanted to start a
new business. One of the things that kept
frustrating them was the mountain of
personal documents that each had to
manage the old-fashioned way—by hand. In
addition, because the documents were in
hard copy form and not always readily
accessible, they might not be available in an
emergency, when they were most desperately
needed.
For example, if Rosa and Shapiro kept their
insurance policies in their homes and those
homes were struck by natural disasters,
could they recover the policies in a timely
way? Were their wills, trusts, bank and
brokerage statements, and other financial
documents available not only to them, but
also (with appropriate safeguards) to their
family members, attorneys, financial
planners, insurance agents, and others who
needed access to them? And what about
personal documents, such as
correspondence, photographs, family trees,
memoirs, and family videos—were they
accessible and safe from harm?
Most consumers have personal documents to
maintain, of course, but “high-net-worth
individuals,” as Rosa and Shapiro call them,
clearly have more, and more complex,
documentation. If Rosa and Shapiro were
spending too much time managing those
documents, so were others of comparable
net worth, they concluded. They decided to
do something about it.
That “something” was founding Morgan
Street Document Systems. The company’s
flagship product, Secure Vault, is a Webbased “software as a service” solution that
makes it possible for customers to store,
organize, access, and protect their vital
documents. The online document
management company was founded in 2005,
and the first release of Secure Vault came
before the end of 2006. The target audience
is individuals who are worth between U.S.$5
million and $1 billion, and each customer
stores anywhere from 100 to 500,000
documents in vaults ranging from 100
megabytes to 300 gigabytes.
Like almost every start-up company, Morgan
Street had to bring its product to market
inexpensively. So initially it chose to create
Secure Vault on the UNIX-based Xythos
document management platform with which
its outsourced development team was
familiar. The decision enabled Morgan Street
to introduce the prototype into the market
and put it in front of second-round investors
quickly. But it didn’t necessarily prepare the
company for growth.
For example, the software never
demonstrated the scalability to support the
hundreds of thousands of customers that
Morgan Street envisioned. Nor was the
platform the optimal choice in other ways.
Changes or additions to Secure Vault on
Xythos and UNIX required relatively timeconsuming and expensive development,
rather than simple reconfiguration—and the
availability of skilled developers was
decreasing as developers moved to
environments such as the Windows Server®
operating system and the Microsoft® .NET
Framework.
“We looked at
SharePoint Server
closely and found it was
built on a more stable
and better-supported
document management
engine than the
alternatives.”
Glenn Shimkus, Chief Technology Officer,
Morgan Street Document Systems
Was Xythos the best choice to scale the
solution as Morgan Street required? Would it
provide the ease of use, security, reliability,
and cost effectiveness that the company
needed over the long term? Morgan Street
didn’t know, but it intended to find out.
Street could offer its solution. The company
chose the Microsoft Application Platform over
Alfresco, Shimkus says, to take advantage of
both its scalability and the range of
integrated technologies—from design and
development tools to security technologies—
available only from Microsoft.
Solution
To implement the solution, Morgan Street
turned to West Monroe Partners, a Microsoft
Gold Certified Partner based in Chicago,
Illinois. Morgan Street chose West Monroe
Partners on the basis of its knowledge of
Office SharePoint Server 2007 as an
application platform and the breadth of
services it provides related to user interface
design, infrastructure, and testing. Morgan
Street also chose West Monroe Partners
based on its ability to manage a large-scale
project on time and under budget, which was
a key business driver for the solution.
The company conducted an in-depth
investigation of its options for a document
management platform on which to build the
second version of its offering. In addition to
considering the incumbent, Morgan Street
looked seriously at Alfresco, an open-source,
Linux-based system, as well as at EMC’s
Documentum system.
Morgan Street rejected all of those choices in
favor of the Microsoft Application Platform, a
range of tools and technologies centered on
the Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007
document management system, Microsoft
SQL Server® 2005 data management
software, Windows Server 2003, and the
Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System
development system. Morgan Street wanted
to optimize the infrastructure that it offered
to its customers and believed that deploying
an integrated solution standardized on the
Microsoft platform was the way to do so.
Glenn Shimkus, Chief Technology Officer for
Morgan Street Document Systems, cites both
technology and business reasons for the
decision. “We looked at SharePoint Server
closely and found it was built on a more
stable and better-supported document
management engine than the alternatives,”
he says. “We wanted security, scalability, and
performance, and we envisioned getting
it with SharePoint Server.”
In addition, licensing for Office SharePoint
Server 2007 appeared to be far less than for
alternatives such as Documentum, which
would reduce the price at which Morgan
“When I began my search for a development
partner, my goal was to find world-class
SharePoint site developers. What I found at
West Monroe Partners was a team of rock
stars—from development to project
management, infrastructure, and testing,”
says Shimkus.
Early testing showed that Secure Vault’s
primary customers put a premium on an
interface that provided immediate access to
the features customers used most. Morgan
Street executives wanted all key functions—
such as moving, renaming, categorizing,
sharing, searching, and deleting documents—
to be available directly on the home page,
without having to use drop-down menus.
SharePoint Server tools were especially
important to Morgan Street. Shimkus points
to shared templates, software development
kits, and application programming interfaces
as enabling the company to integrate its
custom user interface elements with backend SharePoint Server functionality. Morgan
“In the corporate
environment, document
management can get
very complex; we
needed a solution that
would be simple and
elegant to use, and
that’s a strength of
SharePoint Server.”
Glenn Shimkus, Chief Technology Officer,
Morgan Street Document Systems
Street and West Monroe Partners used the
software development kit, for example, to
configure the application without having to
write directly against the database, which
would have added to application complexity
and maintenance. The use of Microsoft Office
SharePoint Designer 2007 made it possible
for the developers to create master pages so
that they could easily customize the
appearance of the interface for different
sponsors and market solutions. The solution
also takes advantage of the Microsoft
Silverlight™ 2 browser plug-in, which provides
some of the highly visual user interface
capability in the Microsoft .NET Framework
3.5.
Beyond the interface, Morgan Street and
West Monroe Partners needed to ensure that
Secure Vault’s document management
capabilities—the core reason why customers
would either buy or reject the product—were
effective. “SharePoint Server really shines as
a document management solution,” says
Figure 1. Major roles and
relationships are determined by
the customer, granting “yes or no”
permissions to delegates, such as
attorneys, family members, and
so on.
Shimkus. “In the corporate environment,
document management can get very
complex; we needed a solution that would be
simple and elegant to use, and that’s a
strength of SharePoint Server.”
For example, Shimkus notes that with Office
SharePoint Server 2007, customers can
create simple “yes or no” permissions, giving
them an easy way to manage access to their
documents by their lawyers, accountants,
financial planners, family members, and so
on. (See Figure 1.) Together with these
advisers and family members, a customer
can collaborate on documents as appropriate
in a productive and efficient manner. Secure
Vault also takes advantage of the flexible
taxonomy structure of Office SharePoint
Server. Morgan Street and West Monroe
Partners used that flexibility to create a
taxonomy that mimics the environment to
which Secure Vault’s customers are
accustomed by using the metaphors of
“documents,” “file cabinets,” and “vaults.”
“We moved
“We’ve
seenfrom
robust
Xythos
market
and
UNIX
growth
to SharePoint
over the
past year—sales
Server
and Windows
are up
1,000 percent.”
Server
because we
needed
Glenn
Shimkus,scalability—and
Chief Technology Officer,
Morgan Street Document Systems
we got it.”
Glenn Shimkus, Chief Technology Officer,
Morgan Street Document Systems
To help ensure Secure Vault’s reliability—
including the security of the solution—Morgan
Street again turned to Microsoft technologies,
especially Microsoft System Center and
Microsoft Forefront™ client security products.
The company’s premier hosting provider
maintained the security of the computer
servers used for Secure Vault—but Morgan
Street wanted more. It used Forefront
Security for SharePoint to gain antimalware
security at the level of the application, not
just at the level of the server. “The ability to
use four antivirus engines simultaneously
with Forefront helps to ensure a high degree
of application-level security,” says Shimkus.
Microsoft System Center Data Protection
Manager provides crucial backup not only to
the storage area network, but also between
farms of computers in different locations.
Benefits
Morgan Street Document Systems has seen
sales of its new Secure Vault, based on
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
soar 1,000 percent in the past year. That
success is the result of meeting its
customers’ needs for ease of use and a high
level of security and reliability. The new
solution has also met the company’s own
need for scalability and cost effectiveness.
Easy Use and Scalability Support 1,000
Percent Sales Increase
“We’ve seen robust market growth over the
past year—sales are up 1,000 percent,” says
Shimkus. “The fundamental reason we’ve
succeeded, during a difficult time for the
economy overall, is that we deliver a solution
that meets the challenges that high-net-worth
individuals feel in managing the vast range of
documents in their lives. SharePoint Server is
crucial in helping us successfully address
that challenge.”
Shimkus cites two examples: easy use and
scalability. A simple interface with key action
options on the home page, and with a
familiar “file cabinet” taxonomy, contributes
to that easy use. So does Silverlight. West
Monroe Partners developers used Silverlight
to deliver a key part of the solution—showing
customers the status of their document
uploads, which could involve 10, 20, or more
documents at a time, and 30 gigabytes or
more of data. Developers used Silverlight to
create an indicator that displays the real-time
status of each upload and of the uploads as a
whole. (See Figure 2.)
“Even when an upload is progressing
properly, it can be frustrating for a consumer
who has no idea whether the upload is
continuing, which documents have been
uploaded, and how much longer the process
will take,” says Shimkus. “Using Silverlight to
deliver this information is an example of
making Secure Vault customer friendly and,
thus, successful.”
Shimkus also praises the scalability of Office
SharePoint Server. “We moved from Xythos
and UNIX to SharePoint Server and Windows
Server because we needed scalability—and
we got it,” he says. “We’re comfortable that,
with Microsoft technologies behind it, Secure
Vault can scale to support hundreds of
thousands of customers, even a million or
more customers, simply by scaling out with
additional computers when and as needed.
We didn’t have that flexibility with UNIX.”
Morgan Street will require this level of
scalability when it releases a version of
Secure Vault it is developing for general
consumers. In addition to supporting
exponentially more customers, the Microsoftbased solution is flexible enough for Morgan
Street to easily adapt its existing business
logic and interface to support the somewhat
different needs of the general market.
Reliability Beats 99.5 Percent
Uptime SLA
Another key to market success has been the
ability to show potential customers the high
levels of security and reliability for Secure
Vault. The protection for a customer’s
documents—and for access to those
documents—is multifaceted, including
hardware protection, application-level
protection, and file-level protection, with
backup and disaster recovery built into the
solution.
Figure 2. Secure Vault shows
customers the exact, real-time
status of each of their uploads,
using Silverlight.
“Microsoft—particularly through its System
Center products—has made security, data
protection, and reliability both easy and
effective to implement,” says Shimkus.
“With Windows Server, we actually see higher
levels of uptime and reliability than we saw
with UNIX.”
One reason he cites for those gains is that
the Microsoft management products utilized
by Morgan Street are well integrated with one
another and with Office SharePoint Server.
“The support is minimal to deploy them, and
they work through a single management
console that boosts our productivity,” he
says.
As a result, Morgan Street has exceeded its
service-level agreement (SLA) with customers
for 99.5 percent uptime; in the year since the
Office SharePoint Server–based version of
Secure Vault has been on the market, the
company has experienced no unexpected
downtime because of Microsoft-based
technology. “Customers—especially the highnet-worth individuals we serve—want to see
results,” says Shimkus. “Being able to point
to exceptional uptime is one of those results.”
Total Cost of Ownership is Cut by
90 Percent
Morgan Street might have expected to pay
more for a solution that delivered more. In
fact, it paid less—a lot less. “By moving from
Xythos and UNIX to SharePoint Server and
Windows Server, we’ve cut our total cost of
ownership [TCO] by 90 percent,” says
Shimkus. “To me, that’s amazing.”
He says the lower costs start with licensing.
Licensing costs for Office SharePoint Server
were less than 10 percent of those of the
UNIX-based solution—and an even smaller
percentage of the potential costs of moving
to a document management system such as
Documentum.
Shimkus also factors the costs of software
development and management into his TCO
estimate. The use of Visual Studio Team
System enabled Secure Vault to come to
market faster—and thus more cost
effectively—than would have been possible
with another development platform, he says.
And he expects the centralized and
integrated management capabilities of
Microsoft System Center to help reduce
management costs over the lifetime of the
Secure Vault application.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business
world’s chosen environment for information
work, providing the programs, servers, and
services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft
Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
For more information about West Monroe
Partners products and services, call (312)
602-4000 or visit the Web site at:
www.westmonroepartners.com
For more information about Morgan Street
Document Systems products and services,
call (866) 551-6737 or visit the Web site
at:
morganstreetdocuments.com
Software and Services
Microsoft Office
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer
2007
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2003
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
− Microsoft System Center Data
Protection Manager
 Microsoft Visual Studio
− Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
2008 Team Suite
 Solutions
− Microsoft Forefront Security for
SharePoint


This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published April 2009
Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework
− Microsoft Silverlight
Hardware





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Dell PowerEdge Servers
F5 Big IP Local Traffic Managers
Cisco ASA firewalls and Catalyst switches
and routers
NetApp FAS Storage
NetApp DataFort data at rest encryption
appliances
IBM Proventia intrusion detection
Partners

West Monroe Partners